Our management team averages over 25 years of career experience in a broad range of relevant technology sectors. These include mobile networking; telecommunications; enterprise, personal and mobile computing; software; and internet services.
Todd Gore – Vice President and General Manager, Americas
Tom Hubbs – Chief Financial Officer
Chris Koopmans – Chief Operating Officer
Lee Llevano – Vice President, Business Development
Andy Missan – Vice President and General Counsel
Constantine Polychronopoulos, Ph.D. – Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Ian Sandman – Vice President and General Manager, EMEA
Hatim Tyabji – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Charles Yan – Vice President, China
Todd Gore has over a decade of sales management experience in the telecommunications industry. He joined Bytemobile in 2008 as senior director of Sales for North America. In this capacity, he has managed the company’s sales pipeline to tier-one and tier-two mobile network operators throughout North America. He is currently responsible for all sales and customer relationships throughout North, Central and South America. Before joining Bytemobile, Gore was senior vice president and managing director, North America, at Teleca AB, responsible for growing the company’s software and support business across the mobile device industry. While at Teleca, he built and managed the company’s strategic relationships with Qualcomm, Adobe and multiple OEMs. Prior to Teleca, he was controller and chief financial officer at Teleca USA, the company’s U.S. operating subsidiary. In this role, Gore orchestrated the design and implementation of all financial systems and controls, as well as human resource operations. Gore holds a M.A. degree from the University of San Francisco and a B.S. from Cleveland State University.
Tom Hubbs joined Bytemobile in October 2001, following a career in financial management spanning the prior 35 years. At Bytemobile, he directs the finance, human resources and administrative functions. Hubbs led Bytemobile’s Series B and Series C rounds of private equity financing, raising a total of approximately $42 million, and the acquisitions of Broadcloud, Daedalus and ProQuent Systems.
Prior to Bytemobile, Hubbs’s experience encompassed the following milestones:
- Led three successful initial public offerings (IPOs):
- interWAVE Communications International (Nasdaq), a provider of microcellular technology and cellular networking solutions for emerging markets (2000)
- VeriFone (NYSE), a leader in transaction automation, focusing on electronic payment systems in a broad range of retail environments (1990)
- Ungermann-Bass (Nasdaq), which led the emergence of local area network (LAN) technology for inter- and intra-office communications (1983)
- Orchestrated several mergers and acquisitions, including:
- interWAVE’s acquisitions of Microcellular Systems Corporation (2000) and Wireless, Inc. (2001)
- VeriFone’s acquisition of ICOT Corporation (1989)
- The sale of Phoenix Technology to Bridge Communications (1986)
- Ungermann-Bass’s acquisition of Amdax Corporation (1983)
Hubbs currently serves on the boards of directors of the following companies:
- DCL, a privately held provider of logistics management and supply chain services
- Provista Software International, a privately held supplier of information technology software for government applications
Hubbs’s early career included financial management positions at Four-Phase Systems, Hewlett-Packard Company and Price Waterhouse & Company (now PricewaterhouseCoopers). He holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Lehigh University and an M.B.A. from Santa Clara University.
Chris Koopmans, a founding engineer at Bytemobile in 2000, is responsible for all aspects of product development, management, marketing, delivery, and support, as well as information technology (IT). He has over 13 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering and architecture. In 11 years at Bytemobile, Koopmans has held a wide range of technical leadership positions. Most recently, he served as vice president of Product Development, leading the R&D evolution of the Unison™ Platform into the worldwide leader in mobile video optimization and the strategic initiative that culminated in the launch of the T-Series Adaptive Traffic Management System. Previously, Koopmans was chief architect for the Unison Platform and its suite of fully interoperable mobile data applications. Prior assignments included director of engineering and numerous other development roles. Koopmans’ contributions include eight issued and pending patents covering wireless internet protocol (IP) services and optimization technology. Before joining Bytemobile, he worked as an engineer at Intel Corporation's Microcomputer Research Laboratories and Silicon Graphics' Cray Research subsidiary. Koopmans earned a B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with Highest Honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and received the Bronze Tablet Award for outstanding academic performance as an undergraduate student. He also received an honorable mention in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards, which recognize the research potential of an elite selection of students. Koopmans was working toward M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at UIUC on a fellowship from the National Science Foundation when he left to help found Bytemobile.
Lee Llevano has more than 25 years of sales, marketing, business development, operations, and general management experience in the telecommunications industry. He joined Bytemobile in 2008 and is responsible for all business development activities, including strategic relationships with technology, OEM, systems integration, and reseller partners worldwide. Previously, Llevano was senior vice president of Sales and Business Development at AirSet, which provided mobile web collaboration services to wireless network operators. Prior to AirSet, he was senior vice president of Sales and Business Development at Visto (now Good Technology), where he managed major accounts with tier-one operators and strategic partnerships with leading mobile device manufacturers. Llevano was also senior vice president of Worldwide Wireless Solutions at Critical Path, where he established and led a mobile messaging business unit that formed a strategic alliance with Research in Motion and served a number of tier-one operators, including Verizon, NTT and SK Telecom. Prior to Critical Path, he held senior management positions across multiple operating functions over a lengthy tenure at GeoWorks. Llevano earned a B.A. degree in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley.
Andy Missan is responsible for all aspects of Bytemobile’s global legal affairs. He has over 20 years of corporate legal experience at companies in the mobile, digital media, internet services, and software industries. Before joining Bytemobile in 2009, he served as general counsel at MobiTV, Danger, ReplayTV, and Egreetings Network. His operational experience at MobiTV and Danger included the negotiation of complex software license, technology partnership, marketing, and distribution agreements with tier-one wireless network operators throughout North America, Latin America and Europe. Previously, he held legal management positions of increasing responsibility at Sony Music Entertainment, BMG Entertainment/RCA Records and WebTV Networks. Missan began his career in the litigation department of the law firm of Sidley & Austin in New York. During his career, he also operated his own outsourced general counsel practice, providing legal consulting services to both start-ups and publicly held companies. A member of the State Bar of both California and New York, he holds a J.D. degree from Northwestern University School of Law and a B.A. from Oberlin College.
Dr. Constantine Polychronopoulos’ research in multithreading computer architectures and wireless network performance optimization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) formed the core of Bytemobile technology. He founded the company in 2000 to pursue a vision of the Mobile Internet and recruited a few of his graduate students, including Chris Koopmans and Nicholas Stavrakos, today vice president, Product Development, and vice president and chief architect, respectively, at Bytemobile. As a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC since 1986 and director of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development since 1995, Dr. Polychronopoulos led research efforts that have had a profound impact on both academic and commercial computing. His innovations included the Computational Network Federations, the first dynamic virtualization architecture; the Nanothreads prototype, used by Silicon Graphics and other companies; and the Parafrase-2 and Promis multilingual parallelizing compilers, which spawned nearly two decades of research and influenced compilers and run-time systems at Intel, IBM and Compaq. Dr. Polychronopoulos has chaired and served on the committees of more than 50 international conferences, served on the editorial boards of IEEE and ACM journals, and delivered more than 70 presentations by invitation at universities, conferences and industry events. He holds 10 U.S. and international patents and has published a book and over 150 papers in research journals and conference proceedings. Among other honors, he received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, the 1998 Bodossaki Foundation Award in Engineering and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1999, he was recognized as Pascal Professor by Leiden University. Dr. Polychronopoulos holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, an M.S. from Vanderbilt University and a B.S. from the National University of Athens.
Ian Sandman, a 15-year veteran of the wireless communications industry, joined Bytemobile in 2001 as sales director for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and was promoted to area vice president in 2008. He was responsible for building the company’s strategic relationships with Vodafone Group, T-Mobile International, KPN, Mobilkom Austria Group, and other global telecommunications leaders. Sandman closed group supply agreements with Vodafone and T-Mobile, which led to deployments of Bytemobile solutions at multiple operating companies throughout Europe and other geographic regions. He also drove the selection of Bytemobile’s Unison Smart Capacity Platform for Vodafone’s Multi Service Proxy (MSP) and T-Mobile’s Mobile Internet Gateway (MIG). Prior to Bytemobile, Sandman was a senior account manager for satellite projects at Ericsson and held various sales training and customer support engineering positions at Nortel Networks and ICV Limited. Previously, he served for eight years in the Royal Corps of Signals, a combat support arm of the British Army that specializes in telecommunications and information systems.
Hatim Tyabji's life and career are embodied in the words of the playwright George Bernard Shaw: Some men see things as they are, and say, “Why?” I dream of things that never were, and say, “Why not?”
As chairman and CEO of VeriFone (NYSE), Tyabji created the world’s first virtual company a decade before the advent of the Internet and two decades before the publication of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Tyabji is a recipient of the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Executive of the Year Award, the Silicon India Lifetime Achievement award, and the Point Of Sale (POS) Industry's Lifetime Achievement award.
After three heart attacks and open heart surgery, Tyabji was told by his cardiologist that he would never ski again. Less than three years later, mind triumphed over matter, as he returned to the slopes and renewed his passion for the sport. In 2005, he completed one of the world's highest bungee jumps at Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The same year, he dove among 16-foot great white sharks in the waters off Cape Town, South Africa. Tyabji has also gone cliff jumping and taken trapeze lessons.
In 2011, Tyabji and his wife Durriya climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. After seven days of hiking up to 13 hours a day, they celebrated their 42nd wedding anniversary at the peak's summit – 19,345 feet above sea level.
Living life to the fullest, both intellectually and physically, Tyabji has been relentless in his pursuit of excellence. He is committed to a system of values inculcated in him at an early age. He has instilled these values at the core of several successful companies under his leadership. Tyabji's pioneering organizational practices are documented in two Harvard Business School cases.
Tyabji is chairman and CEO of Bytemobile, progenitor of the Fourth Wave of Computing — the Mobile Internet. He is also chairman of Jasper Wireless. Tyabji serves on the boards of Best Buy (NYSE), Merchant eSolutions, Touch Networks (Australia), and the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. He is ambassador-at-large for Benchmark Capital.
Tyabji previously served on the following boards:
- Public companies: Ariba, Bank of America Merchant Services, Deluxe Corporation, eFunds, Novatel Wireless, PubliCard, and SmartDisk Corporation
- Private companies: Saraide (chairman and CEO), Datacard Group (chairman), DepotPoint, Impresse, Norand Corporation, and Sierra Atlantic
- Carnegie Institution for Science
- Dean's Council, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
- Dean's Council, School of Engineering, State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo
Tyabji holds a B.S. and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.B.A. in International Business. He is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the State University of New York.
In 2007, Tyabji published Husband, Wife & Company: An Honest Perspective on Success in Life and Work, a book on the complex interrelationships between family and career. Rich in human anecdotes, historical and literary metaphors, and real-world examples of corporate leadership, the book captures the spirit of Tyabji’s personal and professional life. This spirit combines an abiding courage to dream with discipline, decisiveness, unshakable ethics, and integrity.
Charles Yan is responsible for all of Bytemobile’s sales and customer-facing operations in China. He serves as president and a director of Bytemobile China Communication Services Co. Limited, a joint venture between Bytemobile and China Communications Services Corporation Limited (China Comservice, SEHK: 00552). Yan has more than 15 years of sales and general management experience in telecommunications and related industry segments in China. Before joining Bytemobile in 2011, he was general manager of the Greater China region at Airvana, a leading provider of femtocells and small cell solutions for mobile networks. Prior to that, he was account director for China Telecom at Microsoft China, where he established a strategic partnership with the carrier for search, instant messaging and a 3G application platform. Previously, Yan held sales management positions at CommVerge Solutions, Datacraft Group, UCS Communications, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Fluent in Chinese and English, he began his career as a reporter and editor at Shanghai Security News. Yan holds a bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
