Tactical Business Partners

For more than 30 years, Charlie Berg has been actively engaged in leading teams that have successfully brought new technology products to market, predominately in design and discrete manufacturing markets. Charlie has demonstrated a particular competence bringing the right amount of big-company structure to small-company, high growth, high stress environments. He has consulted to over a dozen companies startups and established enterprises in a wide range of industries.

A software engineer with years of experience, Charlie has been a key contributor to more than nine startups, five of which were either acquired or went public. His client Music to Go Media (www.tunegenie.info) required the building of a prototype product from a paragraph of an idea. Charlie led the development of the prototype (and himself wrote the key intellectual property), which led to seed funding. Charlie then joined M2G as co-founder & CTO, and built & led the Development & Operations team to release of 4 products used by 400 clients (radio stations), and further funding of $27.5M.

At Circadian Software, an energy management software turnaround, Charlie re-established the engingeering organization, directed re-implementation, and personally applied the required elbow grease to restart & re-capture 2 previously dormant customers, bringing in the companys first $140K of revenue. Charlie was also contracted to lead the established development team for TVGrid.com, and led the team to the development of new products.

Charlie was contracted by the management team of ChannelHealth to develop the product specification for a white label web presence for local pharmacies. He then led the outsourced product development operation, leading to a successful product launch in under 6 months, and sale of the company for $8M.

At Virtual Machine Works, Charlie was personally hired by the CEO to mentor the Vice President of Engineering. In this role, Charlie assumed many of the senior engineering management responsibilities, all the while coaching the VP. Additionally, Charlie was responsible for the QA, release, and Customer Support functions. After two years, VMW was acquired by IKOS Systems of California for $15 million. At the request of the IKOS COO, Charlie became Director of Engineering Systems, where he re-engineered the corporate customer support process model, resulting in a reduction of time-to-fix problems by 50%. Additionally, he was instrumental in re-dease processes, such that the company was able to break a 1.5 year bottleneck in releasing a new version of their product.

Prior to VMW, Charlie was at Cadence Design Systems, where he was Product Manager for the next generation BoardQuest product. In this role, he managed a group of 22 and was responsible for management of all specification and development of the new product, as well as coincidental training, support, marketing, and documentation deliverables. This product was successfully delivered to Beta on-time and generated 1st year revenues of approximately $850K. Also while at Cadence, Charlie was manager of a core-technology engineering group that delivered the "Correct-By-Design" Allegro product release, based on Charlie's previous work for Cadence in the application of Artificial Intelligence to electronics design systems.

Charlie's previous work history also includes tenures at the startups Palladian Software, Inc. (where he established the technical support group), Telesis Systems, (as a software engineer and manager), the robotics company Automatix, Inc. (as a software engineer and in marketing), and at MITRE Corp. (as the second hire into their Artificial Intelligence group).

Charlie is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, with a BSEE in Computer Engineering and a BA in Psychology. He also studied Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Charlie is not sweating at a startup, he is a professional jazz musician, and a blue-water sailor.