The VMS Mentor Team

The MIT Venture Mentoring Service has attracted a dynamic group of volunteer mentors whose careers represent a wide range of experience as founders, chairmen, CEOs, chief technical officers, or directors of successful corporations and partnerships. The team also includes faculty and staff from MIT and other universities, who bring technical or business expertise to the program. Among the companies founded or led by VMS mentors are:

Companies

VMS Management Team

• Sherwin Greenblatt - Director
  Sherwin Greenblatt, retired from Bose Corporation, was the first employee of Dr. Amar Bose, his former professor at MIT. As a project engineer, he worked on the early development of Bose high fidelity loudspeakers and related electronic systems. As the company grew, he held the positions of Chief Engineer, Director of Engineering, Executive Vice President and, for 15 years, President. Mr. Greenblatt received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from MIT.

• Alec Dingee - Founder & Chairman, MIT VMS
  Alec Dingee brings extensive experience founding successful companies to VMS. Alec is the chairman and founder of Kortec (a turn-key co-injection molding systems vendor). He was the founding CEO of the Institute for New Enterprise Development (founding start-up businesses in depressed areas across the U.S.), Venture Founders Corporation (start-up venture capital funds), Geodyne Corporation (oceanographic instuments), and Massey Dickinson, Inc. (medical instuments). He was also the founding Treasurer and a Director for Nexabit Networks, a developer and manufacturer of terabit switch routers started in 1997. Nexabit was sold to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for the highest value paid up to that time for a company in the pre-product stage.

• David Staelin - Founder
  David Staelin received the S.B., S.M., and ScD. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT and joined the MIT Electrical Engineering faculty in 1965. Dave also served as Assistant Director of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 1990 to 2001. He co-founded PictureTel Corp. and was its Chairman 1984-87. He also was a Director of Environmental Research and Technology Corp. (1969-79) and a Director of EMPower Corp. (1994-99). He is an IEEE Fellow and, as a member of the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity (1987-89), contributed to Made In America: Regaining the Productive Edge. His teaching and research involve signal processing, estimation, and electromagnetics.

• Peter Miller - Co-Director
  Peter Miller has more than thirty years' experience in the entrepreneurial community, beginning by helping found a large local consulting and research firm while in the Masters' program at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Peter has worked with several successful software and Internet firms, and also consults to large corporations on new initiatives, strategy, and technology. He is past board chairman of the International MIT Enterprise Forum and a past member of the Cambridge MIT Enterprise Forum Board, where he teaches an annual business plan workshop.