John Giordano

John Giordano is a Senior Partner at Link and serves on the boards of most of Link's investments. John has extensive investment and management experience and is currently serving as a trustee for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston’s pension and as a member of the Retirement Committee for its 401K plan. He previously served as head of the investment committee and a member of the retirement committee with responsibility for $1 billion of in assets for Bull HN Information Systems (formerly Honeywell Information Systems). During his tenure at Link, John has negotiated and managed the sale of four companies and structured or negotiated dozens of Link’s investments, financings, asset sales and key strategic agreements for Link’s portfolio companies. He also serves as President of Reference Advisor, LLC, a Link Ventures-owned company which provides its clients with best-in-class email marketing solutions. Prior to joining Link Ventures, he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of WebCT, Inc., one of the world’s leading providers of course management systems used by colleges and universities around the world. During his tenure with the company, he was instrumental in transitioning it to profitability and led the company’s negotiation of all agreements associated with the successful sale of the company to publicly-traded Blackboard, Inc. The sale process included successfully responding to an initial challenge by the U.S. Department of Justice. Prior to joining WebCT, John served as the President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Peritus Software Services, Inc., a publicly traded company. Peritus provided solutions that enabled organizations to improve the productivity, quality and effectiveness of their information technology maintenance. During his tenure as Chief Executive Officer, John led the company back from a point of extreme financial distress, attracted an equity investment from a private company and successfully completed the sale of the company in June 2001. Prior to joining Peritus, John served as Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of Bull HN Information Systems, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of France’s Group Bull. As CFO and Treasurer, John successfully completed the sale of one of Bull’s software units and led the negotiations on the maintenance aspects of Bull’s sale of certain parts of its businesses to Wang Global. He also led the company’s negotiations with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation during Group Bull’s sale of Zenith Data Systems to Packard Bell. John also held various other positions at Bull HN including Vice President of Business Operations with responsibility for Bull’s Network Services Operation and a logistics organization that managed an inventory of spare parts with a value in excess of $200 million. In 2001, John was recruited to serve on the Board of Directors of publicly-traded Hungry Minds, Inc., the publisher of the famous “For Dummies” series of books, during the company’s sale process. He served until the successful sale of the company to John Wiley & Sons, Inc. John served on the Board of Directors of Peritus Software Services, Inc. during periods that included the Peritus IPO in July 1997. He also served on the Board of Directors of Telecorp, Inc., a private company, until its acquisition by publicly traded Syntellect, Inc. in March 1996. John received a Bachelor of Science degree from Boston College's Carroll School of Management graduating summa cum laude with a concentration in Finance and a class rank of 1st of 452. He won the Raymond J. Aherne Award and Patrick O'Connell Award for excellence in finance and business. He is also a graduate of Honeywell’s two-year Financial Development Program.