Steve Bell is a serial entrepreneur and Angel investor based in Silicon Valley. He is currently organizing a new digital media startup venture called Startup Trek TV. The company’s mission involves locating and interviewing fellow technology entrepreneurs, engineers, developers, financiers, and educators who are building the next-generation of technology startups.
Bell is a member of the Keiretsu Forum (Silicon Valley Chapter), which is consistently ranked as the largest and most successful Angel investing group worldwide, with 850 members in 18 chapters. He is also involved with the Orfalea School of business at Cal Poly (San Luis Obispo, CA) in developing new programs centered around “learn by doing” entrepreneurship.
In 1997 he founded, provided Angel financing to, and ran the Silicon Valley Networking Lab (SVNL). Over five years he built it into the largest software interoperability testing and and certification lab in the USA, serving industry groups and corporations before selling it to HP-Agilent in Feb 2000. SVNL certified more than 7,000 Wi-Fi products over an eight year period, while serving as the exclusive certification center for the Wi-Fi Alliance. “We invented a new business model for software interoperability certification, while providing the networking industry a crucial resource”, said Bell.
Since 2001 Steve has has studied, coded, and experimented with developing web applications using open-source tools including various PHP frameworks; Ruby on Rails, and open source CMS. He has built over 50 web applications over seven years using these programming languages and CMS (both open source, and proprietary) including running on various flavors of dedicated Linux/Ubuntu and Windows 2003/2008 “ASP/.net” web servers.
Steve sees a bright future for mobile computing platforms and hosted (“SaaS”) web applications, somewhat agreeing with John Doerr’s recent observation that the coming revolution in mobile internet computing will end up dwarfing the personal computer market. He’s a fan of the iPhone 3GS, Blackberry/RIMM CDMA Tour, Palm’s “Pre” OS, the emerging Android 2.0 phones and sub-notes, and Symbian mobile operating systems. He has owned, used, evaluated, and traded in and out of scores of mobile computing devices since 1990 – including 9 Treo’s, 17 Blackberries, 12 Windows Mobile devices, and 7 HTC’s.
In 1995 he founded Bell Consulting Inc., which became one of silicon valley’s busiest high tech strategy consulting firms, serving over 100 corporate, startup, and investment community clients. From 1998 to 2000 Steve served on the Board of Network Peripherals, until their merger with FalconStor Software in 2000. From 1997 to 2000 he served on the steering committee and as treasurer of the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance.
Steve was active as an organizer or panelist in IEEE Computer Networking conferences, John McQuillan’s Next Generation Networking conferences; Networld+Interop; Comdex; and related telecom, datacom, and computing industry conferences (e.g. he spoke at the NxTcomm08 conference about mobile computing, and trends in 3G/4G networks in Las Vegas June 2008).
Since the early 90’s, Steve has had an interest in using mobile handheld computing applications to manage projects and productivity. He was the first (mid 2002) to develop and distribute online a full-custom software application for the then-unknown “getting things done” (GTD) methodology. Steve’s ‘e-Dashboard’ Windows software application synchronized to Palm O/S & Windows Mobile PC’s, and still (2008) attracts web traffic and downloads. Since 1990, he has owned and experimented with more than 125 different models of portable computing devices, using them to explore pushing the envelope of personal productivity.
From 1979 to 1986 Steve worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ where he received patents for the invention of a new type of optical touch sensitive screen, and a voice switching integrated circuit design. While working in R&D at Bell Labs, he also co-founded a digital signal processing venture which eventually became Resound Inc.
Steve obtained a BSEE from Wichita State University, an MS in Computer Science and Math from UC Berkeley, and studied graduate MBA finance and entrepreneurship at UC Irvine in the 80’s. He holds Series 7 & 63 securities licenses; and has consulted for hedge fund, investment banking, venture capital, and private equity firms. He is mentioned as a professional colleague in the “forward” in to two books written by Traders and Hedge Fund managers that he’s worked with: (#27 on Amazon for options books) “The Master Swing Trader” by Wall Street Technical Analysis Guru Alan Farley, and (in pre-order on Amazon June 2008) “Trading ETF’s – Gaining an Edge with Technical Analysis” by Deron Wagner, founder and Head Trader at Morpheus Capital, an ETF-based Hedge Fund and leading ETF advisory service.
