Expertise

Advanced Materials || Electronic Displays || Computer Systems

During his 30 year career, Mr. Willner has accumulated a wealth of technology, product, manufacturing, application, and market expertise in the following areas. In addition, Mr. Willner has developed an extensive network of executive level customer, supplier, manufacturer, competitor, and investor contacts within each area. While the majority of Mr. Willner’s expertise is in general management, fund raising, and marketing / sales, he also has a comprehensive working knowledge of corporate finance, research & development, and discrete manufacturing.

ADVANCED MATERIALS

According to many prominent venture investors, advanced materials may be the next “internet”. The ability to create fundamentally new materials is paving the way for performance, capacity, reliability, and functionality breakthroughs in semiconductors, flexible displays, optical communications, and non-volatile memory.

Mr. Willner has recently served as acting CEO for two advanced materials companies: a photonic nanotechnology company and a conducting/semi-conducting polymer company. In addition, Mr. Willner has extensive working knowledge of the material systems utilized to fabricate all types of electronic displays (see below).
His corporate contacts in this area include senior executives in large chemical companies such as Dupont, Bayer, Dow Corning, Bekaert, Rohm & Hass. His venture contacts in this area include firms such as the Millennium Materials Fund, Battery Ventures, Intel Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and ITU Ventures.

ELECTRONIC DISPLAYS

Most of Mr. Willner’s expertise and contacts are in the area of electronic displays. During his five year tenure as CEO of Colorado MicroDisplay (CMD), Mr. Willner built CMD into the most successful privately financed display company in North America. Since CMD, he has remained active within the display industry through many due diligence projects on display technology startups and regular display industry conference attendance. Both of his recent advanced materials assignments (above) have display applications.

Mr. Willner has over 16 years of experience in the display industry starting from graduate school. The subject of his Master of Engineering thesis was electronic display design alternatives. After graduate school, he started his career in the display industry with the Hewlett Packard Data Terminals Division. Later in his career, he was a founding employee of Metaphor which developed high-resolution display-based products. At Wyse Technology, Mr. Willner furthered his knowledge of displays used in terminals and computer monitors.

COMPUTER SYSTEMS & PERIPHERALS

Mr. Willner was the co-founder of the Advanced Systems Division of Wyse Technology where he successfully built a $40 million computer systems business based on multiprocessor Unix and Windows NT servers. Prior to that, he was instrumental in engineering the turn around of Plexus Computer Systems, a Unix-based computer systems company. As a founding employee of Britton-Lee, he was an instrumental part of both the engineering and market efforts to build the first “back end” database machine (dedicated purpose computer system) designed for mainframes and mini-computers. Through his work at Britton-Lee, he gained valuable insight into the disk drive industry and through Wyse and HP, the computer terminal, personal computer (PC), and PC peripheral industries.