Our Team
We are experienced entrepreneurs and operators who love solving tough problems.
Kevin O’Connor
General Partner
Kevin O’Connor bridges both sides of the technology industry with over 35 years of combined experience as a visionary entrepreneur and venture investor. As founder and investor in several successful companies, including a number that went public or were acquired by entities such as Amazon, Google, and IBM, Kevin offers a multifaceted perspective on business and investing.
Kevin founded his most recent startup, Graphiq, in 2009; he served as CEO until Amazon acquired the Santa Barbara company in 2017 to make Alexa one of the best personal assistants in the world. Kevin first achieved prominence in the tech world as the co-founder and CEO of the Internet advertising technology company DoubleClick, which Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion. Under Kevin’s leadership, DoubleClick rapidly expanded in five years to over 2,500 people in 25 countries. While at the University of Michigan, Kevin founded and served as the vice president of research at his first company, Intercomputer Communications Corporation, which was acquired by DCA in 1992.
As a venture capitalist, Kevin applies his company-side experience by investing in and advising many outstanding technology companies. Internet Security Systems, which went public and was acquired by IBM for $1.3 billion, represents one notable example. Kevin has served on four public company boards and many private company boards.
Mike Tucker
General Partner
Mike launched, scaled, and consulted software companies $0 to $100 million in revenue. He founded M3Rev, a consultancy that drove Go-To-Market strategy, revenue acceleration, and scalable inside sales for public, private equity, and venture-backed software companies. Prior to that, he was one of the earliest employees and head of sales at RightSignature.com, which processes millions of contracts and signatures annually. He founded and helped grow the sales team from 0 to 300 sellers after the acquisition to Citrix generating >300% YoY revenue growth.
At Citrix, Mike became the product group sales and GTM leader for the RightSignature product line and was selected to overhaul and lead an innovation team within the Citrix SaaS division, validating and scaling teams into new markets. The products he oversaw for GTM included ShareFile, RightSignature, ShareConnect, and Podio. By 2017, Citrix had $2.8 Billion in annual revenue, with its solutions being used by over 400,000 organizations and 100 million users worldwide.
In 2019, Mike transitioned from company builder to venture capital, investing in more than 20 early-stage tech companies, often as the lead investor. His operating and investing experience provides a unique advantage for founders looking to accelerate growth, build durable companies, navigate the complexities of fundraising, and get warm introductions to downstream capital.
Ivan Bercovich
General Partner
Ivan spent ten years at Graphiq, a startup which was eventually acquired by Amazon. At Graphiq, he built one of the largest general knowledge graphs and developed natural language understanding and generation technology. The system his team developed powers the majority of Alexa’s open domain question understanding and answering. Ivan is a holistic product leader who has managed large teams (130+) comprised of software developers, product managers, and knowledge engineers. Ivan's technical expertise is in structured data and conversational systems. He has also spent many years refining the human-in-the-loop model, pushing humans up the stack as ML techniques improve. He loves thinking and experimenting with management and organizational approaches to optimize product/ software development and foster innovation.
Cormac O’Connor
General Partner
Cormac O'Connor was an early member of Tinder's Data Analytics Team. During his time at Tinder, Cormac analyzed, and contributed to, all aspects of the business (revenue, customer behavior, marketing, pr, finance, product, etc.), and experienced Tinder going through monetization, IPO (Match Group), and scaling. His primary focuses on the business were testing, releasing, analyzing, and discovering new products, as well as improving customer retention. He worked closely with the product team to test and discover new features. He also worked with the data science team to improve recommendations for users and the push notification team to improve retention, reactivation, and engagement. He provided PR & Marketing with interesting data to be used in stories, and he helped determine marketing's impact on user growth through his registration prediction model. Through his experiences at Tinder, he has an excellent understanding of how data can be used across all the different aspects of the business to make better decisions.
Julia Puzzo
Analyst
Julia Puzzo brings hands-on experience from the early-stage startup world to ScOp. As the first Product Manager at Pave.dev, she contributed to driving the company’s growth across all business areas. She worked closely with data, engineering, and go-to-market teams to discover, develop, and launch impactful analytics products for credit risk teams.
Julia studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Scripps College and Harvey Mudd College.
James Freedman
Analyst
James Freedman brings a mix of experience from early-stage startups and Fortune 500 consulting engagements. Prior to joining ScOp, James worked on logistics analytics at an autonomous robotics startup and led a consulting project on cloud software growth strategies for NVIDIA.
James graduated from UCLA, where he studied Economics with a specialization in computing.
Solving Big Problems?
We’re Interested.
We a want to use our experience and track record of success and innovation to take your business to the next level.