Howard Lindzon
Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Howard Lindzon has over twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. Mr. Lindzon spent the last ten years managing his hedge fund, Lindzon Capital Partners, and is Partner and Principal of Knight's Bridge Capital, a private equity firm based in Toronto.

Mr. Lindzon has tremendous insight into new media and is a very active angel investor in the financial and internet business sectors, invested and involved with over 30 companies. He sold his startup videoblog Wallstrip to CBS Corp. and has made many successful angel investments including: Rent.com, (sold to Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), and Internet Brands (NASDAQ).

Mr. Lindzon's new media and internet business investments include: MyTrade.com (purchased by Think or Swim in December 2008, NASD SWIM), Limos.com (sold December 2008), Covestor.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Foodzie, and Tweetdeck, to name a few. Mr. Lindzon is actively involved in his latest venture, Stocktwits, an open, community-powered investment idea and information service built on the twitter platform.

Mr. Lindzon received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management

Tom Peterson
Partner

With nearly twenty years of strategic investing experience Tom focuses on opportunities for Social Leverage.

Tom's corporate training came right out of grad school working for Exxon affiliated, Imperial Oil Limited (aka ESSO), in Toronto, Canada. Peterson was primarily involved in maximizing branded site operations from a real estate and best offer performance perspective.

From there, Tom found his way to start-up experience with seven years in Biz Dev for ergonomic equipment manufacturer ISE also based in Toronto, Canada. ISE ultimately took him to reside in the Bay Area where customers consisted mainly of Fortune 1000 type technology companies. Responsible for product development, sales and distribution strategies Tom left ISE to become President and COO of then NASDAQ traded Neutral Posture (NTRL) for five years culminating in the successful privatization of the company. Most recently, Tom has been involved independently and collaboratively in Arizona based commercial and residential real estate development.

His experience with capital infusion sources and interfacing with private and institutional investors was solidified in corporate training, start-up management and leading a public company.

Tom holds a B.A. from the University of Alberta and a MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State. He resides in Scottsdale, AZ with his wife and three boys.

Mike Kasten
CFO

A CPA with Twenty years of professional accounting and finance experience, Mike Kasten has extensive experience with startups and technology companies. His background includes audit manager at a big 4 accounting firm, where he was responsible for issuing client financial statements, holding numerous Controller positions including an ebusiness unit of a fortune 40 Company, and Director of Finance responsible for internal and external financial reporting including SEC Reporting for a public company.

Mike served as the former CFO of GolfNow (purchased by Comcast for 40 million), the largest tee time booking engine' on the web. He advises Social Leverage portfolio companies on how to build structure as they grow and will take a board seat or advisory role where applicable.

Marissa Campise
Associate

Marissa Campise is actively involved with growing our portfolio companies.

Marissa began her career in structured finance as a collateral analyst with Deloitte and Touche's Securitization Transaction Team. Here, she ran data matrix table based analyses, processed mortgage collateral, and produced marketable ABS/MBS securitizations.

Prior to joining Social Leverage, Marissa worked in both the Capital Raising and Investment Banking department at Matrix USA LLC , a top ranked, EVA based research methodology firm. Her past work experience also includes developing E-Learning courses for the Adult Education Center in New Haven and working briefly as a London Based Research Associate within the QSAR group (Quantitative Strategies, Analytics and Risk) of a boutique financial services firm. Marissa is also the proud co-founder of a fair trade certified, eco-friendly tea venture that emphasizes artisan tea and teaware.

Marissa graduated with honors from Yale with a B.A. in History.

Knut Jensen
VP of Marketing

Knut Jensen has more than twenty years of experience in the fields of advertising, marketing and TV Commercials production. He has worked with small to mid-size companies on two continents.

Over the past 8 years he has served as Chairman of the Board for Norvision, a digital signage provider. After investing in the company Knut spearheaded its business development and marketing strategy. Prior to Norvision, he created, directed and executed advertising campaigns for IQ Order, a company that developed a comparison-shopping technology using mobile text messaging.

Before moving back to the US from Norway in the late 90-ies, Knut was President of Adieu Tristesse, a company supplying creative and directing services to advertising agencies and production companies throughout Europe. Prior to Adieu Tristesse he was Executive Producer and Head of TV for Leo Burnett advertising agency in Norway. He was awarded numerous Clio Awards and Lions from the Cannes Festivals.

Knut holds an MBA degree from the W. P. Carey School of Business as well as a BA in Broadcasting Production from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunications.

Todd Stottlemyre
Partner

Todd Stottlemyre was a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, serving the wealth management division. Most notably, however, Todd had a successful career in Major League Baseball and is a three time world series champion pitcher. As a right-handed starting pitcher, Todd played 15 seasons for the Toronto Blue Jays, Oakland Athletics, St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers, and Arizona Diamondbacks. He was selected by the Blue Jays out of UNLV as the third overall pick in the 1985 MLB draft.

Todd is involved in several non-profit organizations and serves on the board of Notmykid, a non-profit dedicated to serving the interests of at-risk youths,and the Mel Stottlemyre Multiple Myeloma Foundation.

Soren Macbeth
Partner

Soren Macbeth is is a co-founder of Stocktwits.

Prior to joining Social Leverage, Mr. Macbeth spent a decade working as an information security engineer and analyst for Fortune 500 companies such as Apple Computer, Symantec Corporation, and Safeway. Mr. Macbeth specialized in reverse engineering, threat modeling and penetration testing of networked computer systems and applications. For the past five years Mr. Macbeth has also run an actively managed friends and family investment office developing and deploying proprietary quantitative and algorithmic strategies focusing on the global foreign exchange markets.

Phil Pearlman
Partner

Phil Pearlman was a co-founder of Lumina Fund Management, a long/short equity hedge fund which focuses on behavioral and sentiment analysis to exploit under and overreactions in options markets. He is an expert in the area of market participant behavior and emotion and consults with professional investors employing strategies adapted from empirically validated psychological treatments to improve trading performance. Phil has developed a proprietary prescriptive model of investor experience which integrates empirically validated clinical models and behavioral finance. He is a contributor to Real Money, a paid service owned by TheStreet.com. He currently trades a private account in New York.

Phil is an investor in and director at StockTwits. He also makes angel investments in other social media based start ups and focuses on the relational and community aspects of online social networks.

Phil earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Argosy University in Washington DC.