Michael Cerda

I am an entrepreneur, am married, have two kids, 2 dogs, 2 bands and about 100 songs. I'm an EIR at Venrock, working on the next best thing since sliced bread. And...it's a girl, called "Cc:Betty".

Michael was most recently founder and CEO of Jangl (now Live Universe) a social application company that enables phone calling and texting between people, without exchanging phone numbers. Michael raised $12 million in venture financing over three rounds; built the team of 20; delivered revenue within the first year; created 18 distribution partnerships with social networking and online personals properties; evangelized Jangl’s vision at conferences, in the press and the blogosphere; created a technology ecosystem between VoIP, mobile and ad platforms; and ultimately took a company from concept through productization, iteration, distribution, monetization and acquisition. Michael’s core competency is making something out of nothing, relentlessly finding openings in uncertain fields, thinking without noise, and moving with agility and strategy.

Prior to Jangl, Michael was founder and CEO of Ooma, a VoIP platform that enables unlimited phone calling. Michael raised the initial venture financing, hired the initial team, and drove initial distribution and technology partnerships. After 15 months of the company’s startup phase, Michael recognized the hardware component as a barrier to customer acquisition, and especially in a world where unlimited phone calling was diminishing as a value proposition. It was then Michael began to work on Jangl, a web service based product, with privacy and control value propositions.

Prior to Ooma, Michael was director of business development and on the initial team at Trapeze Networks. Michael was company’s first sales person on the management team, focusing on beta customers, engaging strategic distribution partners, building a technology ecosystem, and participating in fund raising processes. Before Trapeze Michael was director of business development at Procket Networks, director of Western regional sales and account manager at Redback Networks, regional sales manager at Lucent Technologies via an acquisition of Livingston, business development manager at Netopia, and inside sales manager at PixelCraft, a Xerox company.

Michael is currently an EIR at Venrock Associates, where he's co-founded and become CEO of Cc:Betty.