The Team
With over 41 years of C-level global experience in the tech sector, Ivan is a seasoned investor, entrepreneur, board member, and educator focused on helping teams prepare for rapid growth, scaling, and liquidation events. Ivan is the Founder and Managing Partner at Navigate Ventures, a B2B Enterprise SaaS early/mid growth stage fund focused on helping entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley, between series A and the B Growth rounds (A Extension Rounds). Ivan is also the principal at N3 Capital, a multi-strategy single family office focused on long term strategic, responsible, and sustainable direct and indirect investing across asset classes including Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Real Estate, looking to solve the world’s biggest problems by supporting the most creative innovators.
Ivan has deep domain expertise and significant experience in investing tech investing, venture capital, and private equity. He is a member of YPO and CEO organizations and is the Founder & Chair of the VC Vertical in YPO globally. He has a strong global network and regularly hosts a series of private dinners in several cities around the world to discuss the latest industry and financial trends and developments. Ivan has also been an Adjunct Professor at USC Marshall School of Business and has taught and lectured at universities around the world.
Ivan has served on several business, corporate, government, and non-profit boards around the world. He has been featured in numerous publications, including Forbes, Fortune, VC Journal, Business Insider, and TechCrunch. He was a finalist for the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and is a frequent speaker at industry and family office conferences and professional organizations including SuperVenture, Prestel & Partner, IPI, Campden Wealth, 0100Conferences, YPO, among others.
Mr. Nikkhoo received his MBA from USC Marshall School of Business and his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from McGill University. He has completed executive education programs at HBS and Stanford and is a General Securities Principal licensed with FINRA/SIPC. He has lived on three continents, has traveled extensively throughout the world, speaks three languages, and is experienced in doing business globally. He lives in Bel Air, California with his family, enjoys travel, and is an avid skier and sailor.
Fred is a globally experienced investor, strategic advisor, public/private company CEO, board member with over 30 years’ experience building high performance businesses and creating value through innovation and growing and scaling companies domestically and internationally.
Fred has over 25 years operating experience leading companies and driving rapid growth and generated many hundreds of billions of dollars in shareholder value and is a respected industry expert and frequent speaker on Enterprise SaaS, FinTech, digital assets, Blockchain, crypto mining, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and the digital transformations of companies and industries, providing deep technology industry expertise and strategic advice on transformational value creation – the process of generating growth and shareholder value.
Fred led companies through rapid growth to IPO, repositioned companies for high-value exits to strategic and financial acquirers, led M&A and roll-up strategies, as well as successfully executed corporate turnarounds and wind downs. Fred attended classes at the Stockholm School of Economics and executive classes at Harvard Business School and is fluent in English, Spanish, Swedish and French. Fred is a current member of YPO, former Chairman of the YPO Technology Network, as well as former chapter chairman of the YPO California Coast chapter. He is also the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings (NASDAQ:MARA), a digital asset technology company that mines cryptocurrencies with a focus on the blockchain ecosystem and the generation of digital assets.
Neal is a globally experienced software & Internet CEO with over 30 years of C level industry experience. He was the Founding President & CEO of Triton Digital®, a global technology and services leader to the digital audio and podcast industry, as well as Chairman of Westwood One / Dial Global (NASDQ:WWON).
He is an experienced advisor and executive coach to several notable business leaders, boards, and companies throughout the United States. He advises multiple family offices, private equity and investmentfirms on executive leadership and strategic initiatives. Schore also serves as Chairman of Lincoln Avenue Capital, a leading real estate investment firm with over $3 Billion of assets under management.
He was the Founding President of Brite Media Group, an alternative out of home media company, is highly experienced in growth and scaling strategies, raising capital, M&A, executive management development, digital expansion and corporate organization. and has had numerous successful exits.
Schore received a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Michigan State University. Schore is currently active with Harvard Business School (HBS) Executive Education Program. Schore is a member ofthe Los Angeles Gold Southland Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and the recipient ofE&Y’s 2011 Entrepreneur of the Year award for greater Los Angeles. Schore resides with his wife and three sons in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California.
Jonathan Huberman, has over 30 years of high-tech business leadership experience having led numerous software companies to successful exits.
He was previously the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Software Acquisition Group Inc., a sponsor of three blank check companies.
Previously, Huberman was Chief Executive Officer of Ooyala, a provider of media workflow automation, delivery and monetization solutions, He sold Ooyala’s three core business units to Invidi Technologies, Brightcove (Nasdaq: BCOV) and Dalet (EPA: DLT), major players in the same sector. Previously, Mr. Huberman served as the Chief Executive Officer of Syncplicity, a SaaS enterprise data management company, which he sourced and acquired from EMC and engineered an exit to Axway (EPA: AXW). Prior to this, from 2013 to 2015, Mr. Huberman was the Chief Executive Officer of Tiburon, an enterprise software company serving the public safety sector, which he sold to Tritech Systems, and before that he was the Chief Executive Officer at Iomega Corporation (NYSE: IOM), a consumer and distributed enterprise storage solutions provider. After Iomega was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2008, Mr. Huberman served as President of the Consumer and Small Business Division of EMC.
In addition to his experience leading these technology companies, Mr. Huberman spent nine years as an investor for the Bass Family interests where he led investments in private and public companies. He also had senior roles leading the operations of the technology investments of the Gores Group and Skyview Capital. He also currently serves as the CEO of Nogin.
Mr. Huberman holds a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ex-Chief Architect
Walmart Global Technology Platform
Jack brings more than 41 years of experience in technology. As Vice President and Chief Architect, Global Technology Platform, Jack is responsible for operationalizing new technologies and optimizing existing technologies to evolve and support Walmart’striplet cloud and edge infrastructure. Under his leadership, his team is working to increase the resiliency of Walmart applicationsand services by measuring and improving our high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, by rationalizing our workload inventory and dependency management systems, and by maturing the governance, structure, and processes of our Enterprise Architecture practice.
Prior to Walmart, he was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, where he developed key components of Kubernetes, and led ads measurement and the migration of Google Drive to new storage technology. He also served in senior technical roles at PayPal, eBay, Microsoft, IBM, and multiple startups, including NeXT, acquired by Apple.
Jack holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of California Los Angeles with Certificates in Finance and Entrepreneurship and a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics with a minor in Biology from George Mason University. He has written two books, contributed to multiple standards, holds multiple patents, and serves as an investor and advisor in venture capital.
An avid outdoorsman, Jack enjoys hiking, mountain biking and skiing with family and friends. His favourite music is pianojazz from artists like Bill Charlap, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Stan Getz.
Adnan Spahic is an Investment Manager at Navigate Ventures where he is responsible for investment sourcing and assessment, among other responsibilities. He has a decade of successful investment experience and a solid foundation in finance and technology, having graduated from the Faculty of Information Technologies from Dzemal Bijedic University of Mostar, where he developed expertise across multiple sectors.
Adnan is based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and is fluent in English, German, Turkish, and Bosnian.
Bryce is a student-athlete at New York University studying Economics and Business. She harnesses a strong passion for investment and is eager to continue learning about the industry. Her social skills and ability to adapt quickly are additional attributes that make her effective in her position.