Executive Team

Bill Vass is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Liquid Robotics Incorporated, a Data as a Service and marine robotics company serving a wide range of customers in the energy, shipping, environmental, intelligence, communications, scientific, fisheries, and defense markets.

Mr. Vass brings more than 30 years of commercial and U.S. government Information Technology executive leadership experience to Liquid Robotics.

Previously, Mr. Vass was the President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystem’s $1.4B Federal subsidiary. Before Sun Federal, Mr. Vass served as Chief Information Officer of Sun Microsystems, as well as Sun’s Chief Information Security Officer.

Prior to Sun, Mr. Vass worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense Office of the CIO and was responsible for all acquisition and development, research and development, and consolidated software development and commercial off-the-shelf integration standards for over 6,800 IT systems with a $35.5B budget, as well as the Pentagon’s IT environment, managing networks, servers and applications across the defense networks. While at OSD, Mr. Vass was also the technical lead for the entire Department of Defense Y2K program.

Prior to joining the Office of the CIO, Mr. Vass was CTO and technical lead for the U.S. Army personnel systems worldwide.

Before his work in the DoD, Mr. Vass developed large scale IT engineering and business systems solutions for the oil and gas industry, defense systems integrators, and ocean engineering.

Roger Hine co-invented the Wave Glider technology and founded Liquid Robotics. Inc. jointly with Jupiter Research Foundation.

Prior to Liquid Robotics, Mr Hine directed robotics and automation technology development programs at a leading semi-conductor equipment manufacturer, Asyst Technologies.

Mr Hine is an accomplished inventor with several issued patents and several more pending. He received his Bachelors of Arts in Economics from Wesleyan University and his Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Steven R. Springsteel has more than 25 years of experience in operational and financial management. His accomplishments include the management of two successful IPO’s and multiple mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Springsteel also has extensive experience in growing sales, raising equity and debt funding in the public and private marketplaces, as well as formulating and implementing complex business strategies. He has a demonstrated record of recruiting and building strong organizations.

Steve was previously president and chief executive officer of Chordiant Software, Inc., and later Chairman of the Board of Directors. Steve grew the company to record levels of bookings and revenues, brought the company to profitability, expanded into new international geographies and grew working capital to record levels. He successfully defended against a public hostile take-over attempt and ultimately led the sale of the company at a significantly higher price in 2010.

Steve has also served as president and chief financial officer at Verity, where he grew a profitable business through five acquisitions and guided the sale of the company. Steve has also previously held senior financial executive positions at Apple Computer, The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and Altos Computers.

Steve has been a member of the board of directors for both public and privately held companies. He currently sits on the board of privately held Zend Technologies (Audit Committee Chair) and serves on the Board of Trustees of the California State Parks Foundation (member of Finance Committee). In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Ernst and Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” award for Software in Northern California. Steve holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cleveland State University.

Brian graduated from the University of Washington in 1980. He worked several years in marine and onshore geophysical data acquisition operations and operations management, including design and rigging of a seismic vessel for ONGC, the national oil company of India. He was a startup member of LCT, a global gravity & magnetic acquisition and software contractor, which achieved a commanding market share, and was acquired by Fugro in 1998. He served as Vice President of Marketing at Fugro LCT/Fugro Robertson in Houston from 1998 to 2006. Brian was responsible for the startup of the Americas Division for SeaBird Exploration in Houston in December, 2006, working to secure over $100,000,000 in backlog for the SeaBird Ocean Bottom Node (OBN) 4C/4D seismic recording systems.

Brian joined Liquid Robotics in August, 2011 as Vice President, Oil & Gas Sales, responsible for business development, marketing and sales in the energy sector. He is a current Texas State Registered Geophysicist, Board Member and past Treasurer of Intl. Assoc. of Geophysical Contractors (IAGC-1996-2002), Member of AAPG, SEG, IAGC, PESGB, SPE, AIPN and author of many technical papers and articles on exploration and production geophysics.

As Vice President of Product Marketing & Strategic Planning, David Bailard is responsible for the outbound marketing and strategic planning activities at Liquid Robotics. He drives the company’s business planning, market selection, market-engagement and demand generation processes. David leads product marketing, from product and service definition, positioning, messaging and documentation to pricing, launch and promotion across all media and channels. David applies his expertise in solution sales and marketing to accelerate the business development and sales processes at Liquid Robotics that are building customer relationships while generating and closing a pipeline of business opportunities.

Before joining Liquid Robotics, David had a 20-year career at Sun Microsystems, focused particularly on the US government market. As Chief Strategy & Compliance Officer, David managed and executed the acquisition, partnership and compliance plans for Sun Microsystems Federal. He served as Director of Planning and Strategy for Americas Sales, responsible for resource allocation, coverage models and account planning for the $10 billion sales organization. David also held key leadership positions in Federal business development, competitive analysis and marketing, where he led the effort that built Sun Microsystems’ government revenues to $2 billion worldwide.

Prior to Sun, David served as Director of Marketing for Beta Phase, a startup in the specialty metals and electronic connectors business. He began his professional career at The Boston Consulting Group, leading case teams and developing strategies for clients in a wide range of industries.

David holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Howard Dratler is Liquid Robotics Executive Vice President of Global Sales. He is a seasoned technology industry executive with more than 25 years of experience across a wide range of disciplines including storage, content management, data warehousing, SaaS and Cloud.

Howard has a strong track record of success in scaling businesses from early-stage, with few products and few employees, to much larger, global organizations with a wide range of product and hosted service offerings, thousands of employees and multiple divisions/business units.

While Howard’s experience includes deep technology and operational roots, the large majority of his background, experience and passion is in developing multi-dimensional go-to-market strategies and building high performance sales teams in pursuit of significant revenue growth.

Prior to joining Liquid Robotics, Howard served as the Chief Executive Officer of Panzura, an early stage Cloud Storage Service provider. Prior to that he was the CEO at Anacomp, a leading provider of SaaS-based document management services to both large commercial organizations and US Federal executive branch agencies. Before that, Howard was the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at Captiva Software, a leading provider of enterprise data capture and content management software that was acquired by EMC. Prior to Captiva, Howard ran Field Operations for Allocity, a venture funded start-up targeting the email application storage market. From 1993 to 2002, Howard served in a variety of sales management and executive positions at VERITAS Software and was a key member of the sales management team that led VERITAS’ revenue growth from less than $30M to over $1.5B.

In his early career, Howard held a variety of engineering and product management positions as NCR/Teradata.

Howard has a degree in Computer Science from The Ohio State University.

James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was “The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints”. He was previously a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems.

He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs’ for Unix systems.

At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java, and a researcher at Sun labs where his primary interest was software development tools. He then was the Chief Technology Officer of Sun’s Developer Products Group and the CTO of Sun’s Client Software Group. He briefly worked for Oracle after the acquisition of Sun. After a year off, he worked at Google.

Graham Hine was previously Senior Manager of Software Engineering at Asyst Technologies. Prior to that, Graham was CEO and founder of Tuxtops, Inc. and Gibraltar Software until their acquisition.

He received a BA in Management Engineering from Claremont McKenna College, and a BS in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Don Jerome is vice president of manufacturing and logistics and is responsible for all elements of production and supply chain management.

Don has focused his career on early stage and startup companies and has a well-established background in operations, supply and material management. Prior to joining Liquid Robotics, he has held senior level positions at several silicon valley companies that have been successful acquisitions or had a public offering during his tenure. These include Intersil (purchased by GE); Shugart (purchased by Xerox); ELXI (purchased by Trilogy); Plus Logic (purchased by Xilinx) and Photon Dynamics (IPO).

Don was raised in Detroit, Michigan and has resided in California since receiving his honorable discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps.

He received a lifetime Certified Production & Inventory Management (CPIM) from APICS and extensive schooling in electronics during his military service. He then attended CSU San Francisco where he received his bachelor and masters degrees and has completed advance studies at the University of Florence, Italy.

A 26 year resident and mariner of the Texas Gulf coast, Keith Kreider holds his B.S. degree in Biology from Texas A&M University. His extensive career in the Oil & Gas industry has afforded Keith significant responsibilities interfacing with major engineering and oil refining corporations.

Mr. Kreider has spent time with deep-sea organizations, and served in formal Project Management for software deployment, pipeline repair, and large scale EPC efforts.

Keith holds USCG Master merchant marine credentials and has been instrumental in SSQE efforts throughout his career.

Francois Leroy was previously the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Teledyne Benthos, maker of a wide range of oceanographic products.

Prior to Teledyne Benthos, Mr. Leroy was Vice President of Finance and Sales for Triton Elics International, Inc. of Watsonville, CA, a developer of specialized software and integrated systems for underwater acoustic imagery. Before that, Mr. Leroy was President of Omnium Service of Toulouse, France, a provider of high-end computer systems to industrial clients.

Mr. Leroy has a degree in international business and finance from EPSCI, Paris, France.

Astronaut Edward Lu is a respected scientist, technologist, consultant and speaker. Currently, he is Chief of Innovative Applications at Liquid Robotics, an ocean data services company located in Silicon Valley and Chairman of B612 Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to predict and prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts on Earth.

Dr. Lu also provides advice and guidance to leaders in business and government on complex technical issues, scientific and technology trends and long term strategic planning. He is also serves as an advisor to several entrepreneurial companies in Silicon Valley. He is a requested speaker and has given talks around the world on innovation, technology, space, and energy.

Formerly at Google, Inc., Dr. Lu led the Advanced Projects Group responsible for imaging for Google Street View and Google Maps/Earth, book scanning technology and innovative energy projects.

Prior to Google, Dr. Lu had a distinguished twelve-year career as a NASA Astronaut. He flew on three space missions logging over 206 days in space. In 2003 with just nine weeks of training, Dr. Lu earned the distinction of being the First American to launch as the Flight Engineer on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He became part of the first two-person skeleton crew to live aboard the International Space Station for six months. Dr. Lu received numerous commendations for his space service including NASA’s highest honor; the Distinguished Service Medal.

Dr. Lu lives in Silicon Valley and is writing a book about his 6-month stay aboard the International Space Station.

Robert Olson was previously Senior Vice President of Products for VeraCarta Corporation and Vice President of Engineering for PostX (now part of Cisco).

He pioneered internet retailing as CEO and co-founder of Virtual Vineyards/Wine.com, the first company to use SSL to secure credit card transactions on the internet.

Mr. Olson has an MS Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering, and a BS Chemical Engineering, both from Stanford University.

Tim Ong was previously general manager and chief engineer at Lancair International, a leading developer of advanced composite kit-planes. He lead the development of the Lancair Evolution, their newest and most technologically advanced aircraft to date.

Mr. Ong served 15 years in the U.S. Army and Army National Guard where he was a Helicopter Pilot and Mechanic.

He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University.

Michael Schradle was previously the CFO for two public companies: Micro Linear Corporation and Photon Dynamics Inc., and was a Division Controller at Intel for eight years.

He holds degrees in Physics from Stanford and Engineering from UCLA, and earned an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Suneil M. Thomas, Esq. joined Liquid Robotics after working as Director of Special Projects for The Nature Conservancy where he was responsible for negotiating partnerships and organizing political coalitions with private industry, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations.

Prior to that Mr. Thomas was an attorney with Pillsbury Winthrop, and with Ellman Burke.

He received his Juris Doctor from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He studied at Georgetown University and Colorado College, where he received his BA in environmental policy. Mr. Thomas is a member of the California State Bar Association.