Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy

ISNAE Founders

Donald Steiny (steiny@isnae.org) - ISNAE was Don's idea and he organized it. Don received his degree in linguistics from UCSC in 1981. He then spent 15 years as a software engineer leading software development projects at HP and acting as a consultant for Sun, Bell Laboratories, Motorola, Intel and other major companies. Don has created events aimed at increasing social capital for organizations and regions and gained an international reputation as cofounder and program director of Central Coast Angel Network. He has met with hundreds of businesses about their strategy.

Don is currently a PhD candidate at University of Oulu and is a "visiting scholar" at Stanford where he is also a member of the Silicon Valley Network Analysis Project (SiVNAP). He frequently speaks about social networks and was recently a speaker at Ars Electronica in Linz.

Victor Vurpillat, Ph.D. - Victor is a venture capitalist who has participated in the creation of many public companies, including Novell, QVC and public benefit companies, including The Life Extension Foundation. Victor has a Ph.D. in organizational development.

Mark Granovetter - Mark is Joan Butler Ford Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He came to Stanford in 1995 after holding positions on the faculties of Northwestern (1992-1995), SUNY Stony Brook (1977-1992), Harvard (1973-1977) and Johns Hopkins (1970-1973). He received his Ph. D. in Sociology from Harvard in 1970, his B. A. from Princeton in Modern History in 1965, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University in 1996. Mark's research and teaching interests are in the fields of economic sociology, social stratification, and sociological theory. He is the author of two texts about the social structure of markets, both now available as second editions: The Sociology of Economic Life (with R. Swedberg ; Westview Press, 2001), and Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (University of Chicago Press, 1995). His articles include "The Strength of Weak Ties" (1973), "Small is Bountiful: Labor Markets and Establishment Size" (1984), "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness" (1985), "Inequality and Labor Processes" (with C. Tilly; 1988), and "Coase Revisited: Business Groups in the Modern Economy" (1995).

Anna Lee Saxenian - Anna Lee Saxenian is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management and Systems and the Department of City and Regional Planning. She is an internationally recognized expert on regional economies and the information technology sector. Her current research examines the contributions of skilled immigrants to Silicon Valley and their growing ties to regions in Asia. Her books include Silicon Valleys New Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. She has written extensively about entrepreneurs, innovation and regional development in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

AnnaLee is a Member of the California Council on Science and Technology, an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), and served as the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in 1999-2000. She holds a Doctorate in Political Science from MIT, a Master's in Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BA in Economics from Williams College in Massachusetts. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and two sons.

Karen Northup - Karen is a CPA who has been the CFO of several large companies. She was the youngest CFO of a public company and is the CEO of Corefino - a company is a pioneer in the field of outsourced accounting.

Wlad Godzich - At the founding of ISNAE Wlad was Dean of Humanities at UCSC. Wlad came to UCSC from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, where he was professor of English and comparative literature, chair of the Emergent Literatures program, and a professor in the university's Graduate Institute of European Studies. The author of several critically acclaimed books on literature and language, Godzich has held visiting professorships at universities around the world, from Brazil to South Africa to Canada to Spain. His experience in academic administration goes back to 1961 and includes the positions of director of the Columbia University-Barnard College program in Paris; and, at the University of Minnesota, director of the Office of Research Development, director of the comparative literature program, director of the Center for Humanistic Studies, and coordinator of UM's international program in Dakar, Senegal. He also served as director of the Department of English while at the University of Geneva. He has organized more than a dozen international conferences during his career. Godzich is a member of the editorial boards of several journals and has authored a number of books, including The Culture of Literacy (Harvard University Press, 1994) and a new book, "Leituras de Walter Benjamin," which is forthcoming. He is editor of the book series Theory and History of Literature, published by the University of Minnesota Press and the Manchester University Press.

Greg Reeve-Wilson - Greg is an attorney specializing in business litigation. He will serve as agent and secretary for the corporation.

Gerald Barnett - Gerald is Director of the Office of Intellectual Property at UCSC. Gerald brings a unique background to his position. He earned a B. S. degree in mathematics and physics from Walla Walla College in Washington, and stayed there for another year to earn a B. A. degree in English. He then went on to the University of Washington (UW), where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature. As a graduate assistant, Gerald helped start UW's Humanities and Arts Computing Center, where he provided project development advice and computer programming support. Gerald later joined the intellectual property and technology transfer office at UW, with lead responsibility for innovations involving software and digital media. "At UW, Barnett became, in my opinion, the premier software licensing and copyright officer in the U.S. in a university environment," says UCSC Vice-Chancellor for Research Robert Miller. "He developed new strategies for licensing software and copyrighted materials, and those licenses have generated a lot of revenue for the university and for the support of research."

John Grinder - John distinguished himself as a linguist in the area of syntax, working within Noam Chomsky's theories of transformational grammar. After studying with cognitive science founder George Miller at Rockefeller University, John was selected as a professor of linguistics at the newly founded University of California campus at Santa Cruz. His works in the area of linguistics include Guide to Transformational Grammar (co-authored with Suzette Elgin, Holt, Reinhardt and Winston, Inc., 1973) and On Deletion Phenomena in English (Mouton & Co., 1972) and numerous articles.

At UC Santa Cruz John met Richard Bandler, who was a student of psychology. Richard began studying psychotherapy and invited John to participate in his therapy groups. John became fascinated with the linguistic patterns used by effective therapists, and in 1974 teamed up with Richard to make a model, drawing from the theory of transformational grammar, of the language patterns used by Gestalt Therapy founder Fritz Perls, family therapist Virginia Satir and Hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson. Over the next three years John and Richard continued to model the various cognitive behavioral patterns of these therapists, which they published in their books The Structure of Magic Volumes I & II (1975, 1976), Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, Volumes I & II (1975, 1977) and Changing With Families (1976). These books became the foundation of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

John is a co-author of numerous other books on NLP and its applications, including Frogs Into Princes (1979), NLP Volume I (1980), Tranceformations (1981), Reframing (1982), Precision (1980), Turtles All The Way Down (1987) and Whispering in the Wind with Carmen Bostic St. Clair (2001).

In recent years, John has focused primarily on working as a consultant, applying NLP methods and principles in companies and organizations.

Shirley Tessler – Shirley Tessler has been an independent consultant for over ten years at Aldo Ventures, Inc., a management consulting firm focused on new software technologies, software market analysis, and software industry strategy, for both startups and established firms. She spent 16 years in corporate finance and M&A before joining Aldo Ventures. Ms. Tessler has published numerous papers, magazine and journal articles, and book chapters on both the technology and business of software.

Ms. Tessler has also been active in the area of software industry cluster development and national software industry policy. From 1993 to 1999, she was the Executive Director of the Stanford Computer Industry Project, a comprehensive, multi-year study of the worldwide software industry funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She also co-directed the projects software industry research effort. More recently, she has worked with the Korean government in the formulation of its national software industry promotion strategies. During the past year, she has been retained by the World Bank to help formulate a strategy for the development of the Sri Lankan software industry.

Patrick T. Reilly - Patrick was a hard working and enthusiastic support of ISNAE as it got off the ground. He is the founder of the IP Society, an organization that holds events that help clarify the issues around intellectual property. Patrick is an IP attorney and a great networker. His events have been valuable educational events that have brought together experts from many fields to work out some of the issues involved with IP in the 21st Century.

to top of page