Practice Demo Day

Experienced leader with an ability to handle multiple projects with globally dispersed and diverse teams. Leading cross functional team for due diligences on targets for in-licensing and/or acquisitions. Professional with an outlook towards business development, corporate strategy and goals alignment between departments.

J.C. Ruffalo is a Venture Fund Partner at The Cove Fund which is a Seed and Series A Venture Fund that provides startup funding for promising new Southern California ventures. Prior to joining the Cove Fund, he was the Director of the LaunchPad accelerator program at Octane OC. While at LaunchPad JC helped several thousand companies in Southern California raise over $2 billion dollars in capital infusion, and $2.6 billion in M&A, and produced over ten thousand high-paying technology jobs. Such companies include Hyperice, Bonti, EV Connect, AtaCor Medical, and Enevate. JC has been recognized as an active, young entrepreneur filled with high energy, passion, and new ideas co-founding three startups before joining Octane. J.C. believes that nurturing and maintaining strong relationships between entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors is key in successful venture partnerships. J.C. graduated from Chapman University Argyros School of Business in 2011 with a business administration degree in Entrepreneurship and Finance and a Minor in Economics.

Maysam Pessian is an Associate in the San Diego office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His practice focuses on patent prosecution and intellectual property counseling, serving clients in a wide range of technology fields, including the pharmaceuticals and biotechnology industries.

My prior experience in new ventures is extensive. As a General Partner at Norwest Ventures I led the fund’s investment activity throughout the 1980’s in all areas of healthcare and life science.

In the 1990’s, I co-founded Mill City Ventures providing venture capital experience without venture capital control. Ventures included co-founding the dominant technology for harvesting saphenous veins and turning-around a blood-glucose monitoring company.

In 2000, I moved to Orange County founding CNS Response, providing big data algorithm analysis of EEG for medication guidance. I was primary inventor on several patents leveraging off the initial application. Until 2009, I organized all the financings including taking the company public through a reverse merger and associated PIPE in 2007.

In the last few years, I have again become active in venture development making significant time commitments to several young ventures seeking to do well by doing good. Included are ventures in Botox-like neurotoxins, female sexual dysfunction, hair loss, dry-eye, pediatric cardiology and mixed-signal semiconductors.