Our Partners

BORN AT THE INTERSECTION OF AUDACIOUS AND ACHIEVABLE, 

The story of our founders is as unique as impressive.  

With backgrounds in management, science and the arts,our founders have made a life mission to make this worlds a better

Francis N. Beland

Francis Béland leads a multidisciplinary team and travels the world to collaborate with like-minded leaders to usher in new technologies and create tomorrow’s future, today. Meet the man we love to call Francis “Zissou” Béland. Working with private banking, innovation consulting and scientists, Francis focuses his energy in helping organizations create market disruptions for greater futures valuations and impact.

Francis previously served as a partner at Deloitte/Monitor Group (Los Angeles) from 2011 through 2013 where he was a member of the leadership team of Doblin/Monitor Innovation. Monitor, a  leading global strategy consulting firm, was founded by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter; 1200 professionals worldwide serving Fortune 500 clients. In this role Francis led  Monitor’s Open Innovation practice by assisting companies in identifying and developing a systematic approach to engaging and directing external resources in finding solutions to specific business opportunities and challenges while diversifying their innovation portfolio.

Francis has extensive experience developing large-scale innovation programs in healthcare, automotive, biotech, medical devices, governments, oil & gas and energy industries. He was an open  innovation advisor to the European Commission, and an Entrepreneur in Residence for the Food and Drug Administration and he recently facilitated a discussion at the White House to develop new  innovation pathways in the medical technology sector.

From 2009-2011, Francis served as a vice president at the X PRIZE foundation (Vista, CA), where he led the capitalization of $75M worth of innovation projects in healthcare measurement and delivery,point of care tuberculosis diagnostics in Sub-Saharan Africa and India and chemically degradable non petroleum-based plastic alternatives. He increased profits of the division that he oversaw by 59% in 2009 by developing a consultancy practice and increased operational efficiency. His rich set of experiences at X PRIZE included comprehensive projects in bionics, brain-computer  interface, vision restoration, autonomous vehicles, algae bio-fuels, urban poverty, world hunger eradication, developing country social sustainability, cancer diagnostics, and water efficiency.

Francis was a partner in the legendary Cirque du Soleil Lifestyle/ Sid Lee organization from 2007-2009, where he developed the company’s creative lifestyle group by the Cirque du Soleil brand  internationally. He developed the first commercial innovation practice in the agency industry and grew Cirque du Soleil into a multi-channel organization that leveraged the creative and artistic  architecture of the company.

From 2001-2008, Francis served as the executive director of Springs Preserve and Desert Botanical Gardens (Las Vegas) where he oversaw $300M in private and public fundraising to create the first LEED certified community multi-use cultural project. 

He holds a Masters of Applied Management and a Bachelors of Oceanography & Pure Physics from McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Ashley M. Day

Ashley Day, current President and co-founder of E-TRON Technologies, a company focused on the development of technology for the utilization and deployment of systems  for the conversion of Natural Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) petroleum products. E-TRON Technologies has pioneered new processes for the advancement of current methodologies  for the conversion of Natural Gas to liquid fuels significantly changing the face of the GTL industry. He has been active in the clean technology and sustainability  community for 20 years as an Entrepreneur developing technologies and ventures focused on applying cutting edge technology for sustainable and profitable business  solutions.

Ashley's latest success for E-TRON Technologies was developing, building, and successfully operating the worlds largest WTE Tires to Fuel plant in the world. This venture was focused on  processing used automobile, truck and OTR tires into valuable commodities such as Fuel Oil, Carbon Black and steel.

Prior to this Ashley has 15 years of experience with an executive senior management role with TAV Holdings Inc,. which is one of the first environmental and technical development companies  to achieve economically scalable full turnkey solutions for the 100% recycling of metals, plastics and rubber waste stream, and implemented sustainable programs to efficiently place these  commodities back into commerce to complete the full cycle of the recycling chain. TAV Holdings Inc., has over 32 technology and process patents, which are currently being implemented in the  scrap processing and metals recovery and renewable energy industry today with over $1B in sales and material processing ventures and contracts.

Prior to this company, Ashley started Vor-Tek Recovery Solutions LLC based in California, which developed and patented one of the world’s first integrated high volume oil spill recovery systems  in the world. In 2010, Vor-Tek entered the X-Prize Competition (xprize.org) sponsored by Shell Oil and Google, which comprised of the world’s largest and best companies in oil spill remediation  to demonstrate revolutionary technologies in the attempt to create a new standard in the oil spill clean-up sector. Out of 426 contestants Vor-Tek placed in the top 3 by setting new records in  recovery and efficiency rates in this industry in over 40 years and was featured in the documentary “Spill Busters” (2012) that won accolades in the Blue Ocean Film festival in Florida and Hong  Kong.

Ashley Attended San Jose State University and the University of Denver. He played professional basketball for a number of years before embarking in Entrepreneurial endeavors and starting his first company.

James F. Blom

James F. Blom has spent the past 27 years in the technology industry investing in the public and private markets through various senior roles in corporate development and business development as well as building dozens of companies as an entrepreneur, founder and founding investor. From leading teams focused on mergers and acquisitions on the buy side and sell side to investing as a professional angel investor and as a venture partner at the Seed, Series A and Series B stage-Mr. Blom has spent a lifetime building value for his backers and employers.  Culminating in over $5.89 Billion in new profits, services revenues and software sales from partnerships and products he has created and sold. As an operating executive in technology, Mr. Blom is also very well respected in the technology founder and tech engineering circles because of how he marketed an early stage blockchain company from Estonia and lifted them from obscurity; bringing them to the United States and Sweden back in 2013, transformed the ownership of the firm from Hong Kong and Japan and consolidated it back with the founders by growing its revenues in 2013 from $1M in revenues to $63M in under 18 months before their hyper ledger platform was fully productized while in parallel he sourced and built the entire technical leadership -recruiting the CTO, Chief Architect & Chief Product Officer.  

Over the past twenty-seven years his product development expertise and technology supply chain strategies have directly generated over one and a half billion in direct supply chain data centric services revenues, well over four hundred million in supply chain visibility optimization service revenues and well over seven hundred million dollars in capital investment going into new data services and supply chain logistics investments. 

More recently, Mr. Blom has helped the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Germany and Switzerland with their thinking around data aggregation services and protecting consumer data and attributing online transactions to the actual customer and user in supermarkets and across ecommerce service providers, especially data security, data protection and data collection services across their supply chains, data centers, cloud computing and private and isolated global networks. For the holding companies which control the flow of money from cash centric operations to digital payment. For their enterprises. Optimizing payments and security of customer databases. Resulting in new supply chain track, trace and locate visbility services converged with telecom, cloud datacenter, blockchain product offerings from a data residency, data offshoring, data provenance, data sovereignty and data embassy perspective. Some of the companies which have benefited directly from this new product and data services for supply chain optimization are Kountable, Amazon, Alibaba, The Carlyle Group, Raytheon, New Context Services, Lockheed Martin, Nestle, Federal Express, UPS, Aldi, Orkla, Rakuten, Softbank, Bharti-Airtel, Maersk and Walmart. 

At present, James Blom works for the founders and owners of Position A Partners, the founders of Story Ventures, the founders and LP’s behind BootsrapLabs and founders / operators who have family offices and venture arms which are focused on solving the most difficult challenges in transportation, supply chain data services and logistics. Especially attribution, attestation and last mile delivery.
 

gerard k. cappello

Gerard K. Cappello is a Managing Director of Cappello Global, LLC (license series 7, 24 63) and is also the founder and Managing Member of Greenside, LLC. He is a LEED – AP BD+C (Accredited Professional – Building Development and Construction), a member of the United States Green Building Council and a Certified Sustainable Building Advisor (National Sustainable Building Advisor Program). He is currently the President/CEO of Rancho Trio Holdings, Inc. in California and Rancho Trio Holdings, LLC in Colorado. He was formerly President of Euro American Capital Corp. (member NASD).

Gerard’s investment banking career started 1985 and he specializes in merchant banking, project finance and venture capital. His investment banking experience includes positions as Principal, VP and Analyst at Swiss American Financial and Euro American Financial Corp., two merchant and investment banking firms that operated offices in North America, Europe and Asia. His investment banking expertise has served dozens of companies from sourcing of prospects and deals, financial and marketing analysis, structuring and raising capital and management at the executive board levels. At Cappello Global, LLC, he was a pioneer of financial structures for public companies that will result in the placement of over one billion U.S. dollars in private placements as well as transactions of highly complex, customized terms to suit the needs of both investors and issuers. Additionally he has personally managed the transactions of numerous financial negotiations involving venture capital start-up companies and mergers and acquisitions of private and public entities.

Gerard has served on the board of directors and/or as advisor to several organizations, municipalities, and growth companies including Coffees of Hawaii, Inc., Fibercomp, Inc., HAI Advisors, Inc., Boutique Hotel Group, and as the organizer of the advisory committee to the Getty Information Institute, the City of Malibu – Architectural & Engineering and Skatepark Committees and the Malibu Chamber of Commerce.

He is an active member of the World Presidents’ Organization (WPO) and the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), where he has served as the founder and past Chairman of the Malibu Chapter and on the Pacific Regional Board of Directors. In the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (YEO), he served on the International Board of Directors for seven years and is a former President of the LA Chapter. He is also the past Chairman of the Board of Catholic Big Brothers Big Sisters of Los Angeles and is a current Member of the Board of Directors for the Tony Hawk Foundation.

Gerard earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, majoring in Finance and Business Economics with an emphasis on Real Estate.