Board of Directors


Stuart Phillips, Managing Partner, Ridgelift Ventures
Stu Phillips is the Managing Partner of Ridgelift Ventures. Stu has a rare combination of in-depth operating expertise coupled with a successful track record in venture capital. Prior to founding Ridgelift Ventures, Stu was a General Partner at US Venture Partners where he led investments in communications, software and services companies, such as Cacheflow, @Road, Procket Networks, Flyswat, Merlin Networks and Force10 Networks. Before becoming a venture capitalist, Stu gained over 20 years of operating experience, most recently at Cisco Systems where he was the VP of Central Engineering responsible for the strategy and development of the Cisco IOS. In addition, he held operating roles at Tandem Computers, Logica, and ICL. Stu originally hails from Oxford, England and attended the University of Wales in Cardiff, UK where he received a Bachelor of Science in Electronics (summa cum laude).

Yishay Schwerd, MuseStorm Founder & VP of Engineering
Yishay Schwerd co-founded MuseStorm in 2005 and today is responsible for providing leadership to the R&D and global operations teams based in Tel Aviv, Israel and for coordinating product development with the customer-facing teams in Sunnyvale, CA.  Yishay has over 14 years of experience as a software engineer, manager and executive.  Most recently, Yishay served as Director of R&D to Starhome, a subsidiary of Comverse (Nasdaq:CMVT). As part of this, he led development of telephony infrastructure products, giving him expertise in developing infrastructure products that are enterprise ready, robust, redundant, and scalable to millions of users.  Prior to Starhome, Mr. Schwerd held executive roles at Elron Telesoft and at Phonetic Systems, now a division of Nuance (Nasdaq: NUAN), the leader in voice-recognition technology. Yishay has been developing software since the tender age of 9.  He holds degrees in Law and Economics from Tel Aviv University.

Ori Soen, MuseStorm Founder & CEO
Ori Soen founded MuseStorm in 2005. Apart from managing day-to-day operations, as CEO, he is focused on business development, sales, and building customer acceptance for MuseStorm as the professional way to widget.  A serial entrepreneur, prior to co-founding MuseStorm, Mr. Soen held executive positions at Mercury Interactive before and after its acquisition by HP.  Prior to that, he was involved in building two mobile companies:  Followap (acquired by NeuStar) and MobileSpear.  Ori holds degrees in Computer Science and Business from Hebrew University. A citizen of Israel, he now makes his home in Sunnyvale, New York with his wife and two daughters.

Assaf Topaz, Vice President Elron (TASE, NASDAQ: ELRN)
Mr. Topaz joined Elron in 2004 bringing to Elron extensive experience in strategic marketing, operations and management of fast growing companies in an international arena. His areas of expertise include Information Technology, and Internet, Cellular & new media applications. Mr. Topaz is a Board Member at several companies including Aternity, Enure, Expand Networks, MuseStorm, Journeys, PLYmedia and Atlantium.  Prior to Elron, Mr. Topaz was a Co-Founder and COO of Gilian Technologies (acquired by Breach Security Inc.), a leading provider of application security for the corporate market. During his tenure at Gilian Technologies, Mr. Topaz led the operations in the U.S. headquarters and the Israeli R&D center. Prior to this post, Mr. Topaz held executive positions in leading marketing and advertising consulting firms, such as McCann-Erickson, Kesher-Barel, and ZSZ-Euro RSCG.  Assaf holds a B.A degree in Economics and Geography from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an M.Sc in Management from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, New York