Rich Levandov has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, operator, angel investor and venture capitalist involving a variety of cutting-edge, high growth, early-stage technology companies. It was after he co-founded Phoenix Technologies (PTEC), a company that helped launch the PC revolution, and served as an early Vice President at America Online, Inc. that he started his venture capital career. Rich leads Avalon’s investments in Ad Summos, Backupify, Cloudant, Inc., Cloudkick (acquired by Rackspace), Kaltura, NABBR, Pictela (acquired by AOL), ReThinkDB, Simulmedia, Standing Cloud, Twinstrata, chumby industries and Zynga. Prior to joining Avalon as a Partner in 2007 Rich co-founded Masthead Venture Partners and previously was an affiliate partner with Softbank Technology Ventures.  Notable companies that Rich has invested in and/or sat on the Board of include Art Technology Group (ARTG), BitPipe (acquired by Tech Target), Bright Mail (acquired by Symantec), Mobilee (acquired by Natural MicroSystems), NewsGator, OLiVER (acquired by LivePicture), PersonaLogic (acquired by AOL), Sombasa Media (acquired by PrimeMedia), TACODA (acquired by AOL), Tremor Media, and Valent Software Corporation (acquired by Lycos). Rich holds a B.S. from Binghamton University. He codes in PHP and Ruby these days. Rich is active in the Boston, New York City and San Francisco venture and entrepreneurial communities. As a past judge on the MIT 100k business plan competition he remains very active in various organizations on both coasts promoting the creation of new disruptive enterprises and believes that we are in the exciting era of “mobile meets social meets local meets global” company creation.