jonathan betts-lacroix, founder, cto

Prior to founding OQO, Jonathan Betts-LaCroix founded Analog Design, an electrical engineering design-and-build firm with clients including IBM, Apple Computer, and Maxtor. In 1998, he was the founder and primary technical and business contributor for Unilinear, where he developed a snap-on PC-card/wireless adapter for Palm-compatible PDA's. Jonathan previously worked as a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

Jonathan has several patents issued and pending in the area of analog electronics, including the "floating triangle" A-D converter in the IBM TrackPoint pointing device.

Jonathan holds an A.B. from Harvard College in environmental geoscience, and an M.S. degree from MIT in earth, atmospheric, and planetary science. Jonathan has also worked as a researcher at Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MIT and Harvard. He has published articles in major journals on electronics, computational biophysics and planetary evolution.

bob groppo, vp engineering

Prior to joining OQO in 2007, Bob was a senior fellow at Flextronics reporting to the CTO and responsible for driving engineering aspects for new ODM initiatives and component businesses within the Flextronics business units. Bob's responsibilities at Flextronics covered Mobile Handset and Consumer Digital business units, including driving platform hardware and software architectures, building and mentoring global engineering organizations, and establishing and driving engineering best practices and tools. Over his tenure, Bob has worked on smartphones, digital still cameras and camera modules, portable media players, wireless modules, and various computing platforms.

Bob has 20+ years of experience working on PC systems including mainstream desktop, notebook, appliance and server platforms. His experience ranges from chip level and system level architecture work (Intel, Momenta, Microcenter/WinBook, Power Computing) to high availability, scalable server designs (Sun). At Intel, Bob was first manager of the Intel Mobile Lab and led a team responsible for defining mobile CPU architecture. As a consultant, Bob worked on a variety of embedded systems ranging from set-top box designs, streaming servers and clients as well as storage servers.

nick merz, vp of design

Prior to co-founding OQO, Nick was a Product Designer in the Powerbook group at Apple Computer. At Apple, he was a key member of the teams developing the G3 Powerbook, and the G4 Titanium Powerbook, from concept through early engineering builds. At OQO, he has championed a user-centric design philosophy, and lead the product design team through the invention and early refinement of a new computer-user paradigm: the ultra-mobile PC. OQO computers have won worldwide recognition for their design, including Best of Show at CES several years running, and the Japanese Good Design Award (G-Mark) for industrial design.

As of December 2008, Nick has a mix of 14 design and utility patents issued (20 pending) for his work at Apple and OQO. He is an instructor in the industrial design department at California College of the Arts. Nick holds a B.S. degree in Engineering Product Design from Stanford University.

andrew popell, founder & CEO

Prior to co-founding OQO, Andrew founded several companies, including Keynote Systems (KEYN), where he was the VP of Marketing, and Harvest Technology, a financial software company where he was the COO. Previously, Andrew was in charge of marketing for two vertical industry sales groups at Oracle Corporation. Andrew is a partner at Olive Hill Investment Partners, a venture capital firm investing in seed-stage technology firms.

Andrew holds an A.B. degree from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

bob rosin, svp sales and marketing

Prior to joining OQO in 2002, Bob Rosin was founder and president of Bang Networks, Inc, a provider of networking technologies enabling enterprises to develop and deploy real-time web applications. Previously, Bob was Program Manager at Sony Corporation in Tokyo and in California, where he was responsible for product planning and strategy for Sony's interactive set-top box products, and managed the WebTV™ Internet Terminal product line. He holds eight patents related to network technologies.

Bob holds a B.A. degree from Cornell University and an M.B.A from Harvard Business School, where he won the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He has earned certificates in Japanese language from Keio University, Stanford University, and the Japanese government.