Roger Strauch is chairman of The Roda Group, a venture development company, based in Berkeley, California. His firm, co-founded in 1997 with Dan Miller, provides entrepreneurs the environment, resources, and guidance to launch and grow their high technology businesses.

Mr. Strauch is on the board of directors of two private companies -Ink2 and GameReady. In November of 2008, Sightspeed, who's board Mr. Strauch served on, was sold to Logitech International. The Roda Group is the lead investor in Solazyme and co-investor in Ravenflow.

He recently co-founded and is an owner of iCON Communications, a broadband ISP in Armenia utilitizing WiMax technology.

Mr. Strauch co-founded Polyserve, a server and storage consolidation software company sold to HP in 2007.

He was the first CEO and former chairman of Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) a leading search engine on the web.  Mr. Strauch was a board member and former CEO of Symmetricom, a telecommunications equipment manufacturer. In 1983 he co-founded TCSI Corp., a telecom software company. As TCSI’s chairman and CEO, Mr. Strauch was responsible for growing the company from a start-up to over $60M in annual revenues. TCSI completed a successful IPO in 1991 and secondary public offering in 1996.   

Mr. Strauch is a member of the Engineering Dean's College Advisory Boards of Cornell University and University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of the 2002 Wheeler Oak Meritorious Award from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2006, Mr. Strauch and his wife Dr. Julie Kulhanjian were named and honored as "Builders of Berkeley". He is an executive member of the Board of Trustees for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and is a past President Emeritus of the Berkeley Repertory Theater.  Mr. Strauch is a member of the Executive Board of the Piedmont Council of the Boy Scouts of America and serves as a leader in the local scouting troop.  He is a Life Trustee of the Armenian Assembly of America.

Mr. Strauch endowed the Roger A. Strauch Chair in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and co-founded the William Saroyan Endowment for Armenian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. With Mr. Miller, he helped establish the Ask Jeeves Planetarium at the Chabot Space and Science Center and the Roda Theater at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, winner of the 1997 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.

Mr. Strauch is the Chairman of the Paros Foundation which supports arts and education organizations in Armenia. Paros projects include The Paros Chamber Choir - which is composed of disabled musicians, The Manana Youth Center – an after school training program for documentary and animated film production, photography and journalism, and The Vanadzor Museum of Fine Arts– an artistic center in the Lori region.

For forty years, Roger has been a licensed amateur radio operator - he holds an extra class license. His current call sign is KD6UO and it was WA1KZE. With his friend Don Melcher, he jointly owns and remotely operates a station based in Mariposa, California.

Mr. Strauch earned a Bachelor of Science degree, with distinction, from Cornell University and Master of Science degree from Stanford University, both in electrical engineering. He holds two patents in the area of wireless communications.

Dan Miller is Managing Director of The Roda Group, a venture development company based in Berkeley, California.  Dan serves on the boards of several Roda Group companies including Solazyme, a renewable energy company, and was previously the president of Ask Jeeves, Inc. (now Ask.com), a former Roda Group affiliate company.

Mr. Miller was Executive Vice President of TCSI Corporation, a company he co-founded with his Roda Group partner, Roger Strauch. TCSI (now owned by Rocket Software) is a leading provider of integrated software products and services for the global telecommunications industry.  Prior to TCSI, Mr. Miller was a systems engineer at Hughes Aircraft's Space and Communications Group where he was responsible for designing communications payloads for commercial communications satellites.

Mr. Miller received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, with distinction, from Cornell University and his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He holds three patents in the areas of compression technology and wireless communications systems.

Mr. Miller is President of the Foundation Board of Trustees of the Chabot Space & Science Center and is also a member of Cornell University's Computing and Information Science and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisory Boards.  He is also a member of The Climate Project and has given talks about climate change at conferences across the nation.