Team

Jim Kinchley
President & CEO
With over 20 years in sales and sales management, Jim has demonstrated success in developing new markets for emerging products and early stage companies. As the Vice President of Business Development for the last two and a half years, Jim spearheaded Trufina’s market expansion into the broad spectrum of professional communities, employment, mentoring and auction websites they now support.

Early in his career, Jim held sales management positions with: Racotek, a pioneer in wireless communications; Altos Computers, purchased by Acer Computers; and Microcom an early leader in network computing subsequently purchased by Cisco. Later, as Director of Sales at Brightmail, his sales efforts precipitated Brightmail’s C round funding.

Chris Madsen
co-Founder, Member of the Board
A technology and business development veteran, Chris co-founded Brightmail, where he led product management and business development. There he successfully built business relationships with companies including Microsoft, AT&T, Comcast and Symantec. Brightmail was sold to Symantec in 2004. Chris was a former partner at Milestone Equity Partners, and previously held management and sales positions with Trusted Information Systems, IDS (VRML company), Thinking Machines Corp, and Symbolics, Inc.

Gaige Paulsen
Strategic Technology Advisor
Gaige has worked for 27 years in the software and Internet industries, serving in technical and operations leadership positions. Gaige co-founded InterCon Systems and served as its CTO/COO for 7 years while it grew to be a leader in the Macintosh TCP/IP software market. After successfully selling the company to PSINet, Gaige moved to Ascend Communications where he was the Director of Software Architecture. There he led the team responsible for re-architecting the operating systems for the company's access products, including the Max and the TNT. In 2000, Gaige co-founded Inter.net and as Executive VP and CTO, managed global technical decisions. Since 2002, he has been acting as a management and technical consulting and led the sale of a Canadian ISP in 2006. Gaige has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, where he worked at NCSA (one of five NSF supercomputing centers) co-developing NCSA Telnet, and the first versions of HDF (the NCSA data file format scientific applications).

Kurt Baumann
Member of the Board
Kurt Baumann has been involved with the Internet since 1982. He has founded and led several Internet companies including InterCon Systems, one of the first TCP/IP software companies, and Inter.net, a global ISP. He has also worked as a Senior Executive at a major publicly-held ISP, PSINet. Kurt's leadership roles have included CEO, COO, SVP of Business Development, and SVP of Marketing. Kurt is known as a visionary in the companies he has worked as well as the boards on which he has sat. Kurt attended University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana and was a key participant in the PLATO project (one of the very first interactive online games) in the early 80's.

Jed Harris
Member of the Board
Jed Harris held senior technical and management roles at Intel (1983-87) and Apple (1987-97). He created and ran CI Labs, an industry consortium funded by Apple, IBM, Adobe and Novell, with participation from Sun and Hewlett Packard among others. From 1997 to 2000 he was a principal in the venture arm of Ricoh Silicon Valley. Since 2000 he has led angel investments in late stage rounds of PayPal, Brightmail, and the seed round of Trufina.