Who We Are

Introduction

We are a privately held professional services company located in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. We’re in the East Bay, between Berkeley and Silicon Valley.

We were formed in 1992 and focused initially on providing diligence services to venture capital firms, and helping start-ups get a move on with strategy, product, and market development. But we soon found ourselves in the business of creating collaborative alliances between technology companies — even natural competitors — to seed and grow markets based on new technologies and industry solutions they produced together.

Today we specialize in forming, launching, and managing what we now call collaborative business ecosystems — also known as Alliances, SIGs, Fora, Consortia — in the high tech, healthcare and energy markets. Our engagements represent more than 10,000 private and public sector entities around the world, and include start-ups, tech heavyweights, academic institutions and government bodies.

Our clients seek to resolve pain points and fill market gaps with required solutions —  whether that’s a cause, an industry standard, a common development platform and community, a methodology to test and certify products to a common framework, or simply taking what’s already there and motivating deployment. The desired result is larger commercial opportunity for all in the value chain.