Primary Job Title Founder and Managing Director Primary Organization S3 Ventures
Location Austin, Texas, United States Regions Southern US Gender Male
Investor Type Investor Stage Number of Exits
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Brian Smith serves as the Founder and Managing Director of S3 Ventures, an earlier-stage venture capital firm with $95M under management. He oversees all of S3′s investments. S3 invests primarily in Texas and the southwest. Brian previously worked at Solace Therapeutics as a Board Of Directors. He attended Purdue University and the University of
Cincinnati.
Brian co-founded the Convergent Investors Fund before S3, a $70M early-stage venture capital firm in Texas where he oversaw investments in 10 companies. At age 29, he founded and served as chairman and CEO of Crossroads Systems (Nasdaq: CRDS).
He led Crossroads through five rounds of venture, strategic and mezzanine financing, and to a successful IPO in 1999. Brian Smith ran Crossroads as a public company for nearly four years. In this role, he was an early pioneer in Storage Area Networks (“SANs”), which are industry-standard solutions today. For his efforts, he was awarded the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2000. He spent the first seven years of his career in electrical engineering positions holding product development roles within the Technology Group of the IBM Corporation.
Brian Smith earned a BSEE with honors from the University of Cincinnati and an MSEE from Purdue University.
He served on the board of Confirmative Systems (acquired by Intel), Chicory Systems (acquired by CEVA), Crossroads Systems (Nasdaq: CRDS), LibreDigital (acquired by RRD), Furnace (acquired by BMC Software), Sipera System (acquired by Avaya, Inc,) and StoredIQ (acquired by IBM).
Brian Smith currently serves on the boards of Alkami, BlueCava, Digby, Gravitant, Invodo, Kimbia, OrthoAccel, Packet Design, and Tango Health.
