Nick Efstratis is a Managing Director at EPIC Ventures and has been a venture capitalist investing in seed and early-stage technology companies since 1999. Nick brings over a decade of investing experience coupled with direct operating experience in emerging enterprise and start-up companies. Along with the other Managing Directors of EPIC, he concurrently is an officer of Zion's Bank SBIC Venture Fund. Prior to EPIC Ventures, Nick held numerous positions at Wasatch Venture Fund, including Associate, Partner and Managing Director. He was also an Officer of MACC Private Equities, a publicly traded investment management company. Notable exits that Nick has worked on at EPIC include Ancestry.com (NASDAQ: ACOM), Berkeley Data Systems, a.k.a., Mozy (sold to EMC), Tricipher (sold to VMware) and Advanced Software (sold to Embarcadero Technologies). His current portfolio includes many market leading companies, including Alliance Health Networks (Health Social Networks), HyTrust (Virtualization Compliance, Security and Management), Instructure (Open Source LMS), Medsphere Systems (Open Source Electronic Health Records), Solution Reach (Doctor / Patient Communications Services), Xydo (Content Curation) and Zettaset (Hadoop-based Big Data platform).

Kyle is currently pursuing a Master of Accountancy at Brigham Young University. A large portion of his time is devoted to learning the ins and outs of tax accountancy, but once the books are closed Kyle can be found working on some new entrepreneurial pursuit, or working with professors on research projects.  Follow him on Twitter.

Email: kshields@startupgrind.com | Twitter: @@MrKyleShields

Google is offering startups $1,000 of credit to start building applications on Google App Engine. App Engine is a development platform that makes applications easy to write, simple to scale, and trivial to manage. Application deadline is March 31, 2013. Use verification code: SGAE-02