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Tuesday, December 13, 2016 at 10:07am.
TiE Oregon Confessions of an Entrepreneur with Gerry Langeler (Co-founder of Mentor Graphics)
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For 24 years, Gerry has served as a Managing Director with OVP Venture Partners, the most experienced venture capital firm in the Pacific Northwest. OVP is in its 33rd year, having raised its seventh fund (OVP VII) at $250 million. OVP has over $750 million of capital under management and focuses on early-stage companies in information technology, clean tech, and digital biology. Since its founding in 1983, the partnership has backed over 125 startups – and seen over 50 liquidity events including 25 IPOs with more than 30 others being acquired by public companies.
From 1981 to 1992, Gerry was co-founder of Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) where he served as President and Board member. He helped lead Mentor to over $400M in sales and $1B in market capitalization, ranking it as one of the largest and most profitable of all U.S. companies founded in the 1980s. The company remains the fastest growing public software company to $200 million (in constant dollars) in US history. At now over $1B in sales, Mentor continues to rank as the second largest software company in the Pacific Northwest, behind only Microsoft.
His service as a board member covers the range from enterprise software, network security, wireless communications and clean tech to biotechnology. He is the author of The Success Matrix – Winning in Business and in Life (Logos Press, March 2014), Take the Money and Run! An Insider’s Guide to Venture Capital (Smashwords and Lulu Press, 2011) and The Vision Trap (Harvard Business Review, March 1992), which continues to be widely used in business schools and corporate training sessions.
He currently serves on the Board of Directors of CradlePoint, DataSphere, EnerG2, and Novomer.
In 2012, Gerry was appointed by Governor Kitzhaber to the Oregon Growth Board where he serves as co-chair. He previously served as School Board Chair of the Riverdale School District and also chaired the Riverdale School Foundation. He has served as Chair of the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (OMSI) Board of Trustees, and Chair of the State of Oregon Facilities Authority – a bonding agency for not-for-profits. In 2011, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network.
He holds a BA, Chemistry from Cornell University, and a MBA from Harvard.