Founders
Walter Luh
Co-founder and CEO
wluh@anscamobile.com
Walter is the creator of Corona.
Prior to Ansca, he led the Adobe Flash Lite engineering team. As Lead Architect, he achieved technical breakthroughs, pioneered advanced mobile research, and jump-started strategic relationships with Texas Instruments and Cisco. With over a decade of R&D experience, he has a proven track record of shipping successful products from mobile runtimes like Flash Lite to industry-standard desktop products such as Adobe Illustrator and Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
Walter holds an undergraduate degree in Physics from Swarthmore College, and a master's in computer science from Stanford University.
Carlos M. Icaza
Co-founder and Chief Evangelist cicaza@anscamobile.com
Carlos has more than 20 years of engineering and management experience. Carlos managed various teams at Adobe including Flash Lite, Flash Mobile Authoring, and Flash Cast. He was responsible for creating and developing Adobe's entire mobile authoring strategy, now deployed across the entire Adobe Creative Suite.
Carlos has a proven track record of managing and shipping industry-standard products including Flash Lite, Flash Authoring, Adobe Mobile Device Central, Adobe Illustrator, SVG, Adobe Pagemill, Micrografx Windows Draw, and Deneba Canvas.
Board of Directors
Salman Ullah
Salman co-founded Merus Capital in November 2007. Previously he was Vice President of Corporate Development at Google, where he spent three years managing a worldwide team responsible for all of Google’s acquisitions and investments. Prior to Google, he spent over seven years at Microsoft in several roles including General Manager of Corporate Strategy and Managing Director of Corporate Development.
Earlier in his career, he was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey in Chicago where he spent four years working in the technology and consumer goods sectors. He was also a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in physics at the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago.
He holds an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University.
Gary Hooper
Gary is currently vice president of software engineering at Western Digital, where he is responsible for application software. Prior to WD, he was co-founder and vice president of products for Catalyst Mobile, a music and entertainment services provider to operators and consumers in Asia.
Prior to Catalyst, Gary was vice president of engineering for Macromedia’s Mobile and Devices division, leading the engineering team since its inception in 2000. He created Flash Lite, the mobile version of the ubiquitous Flash Player and delivered FlashCast, a client-server push-data services system.
Gary also held various engineering management roles at Alias|Wavefront, where he delivered Maya, which was awarded an Oscar for Technical Achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2003.
Gary has a master’s degree in computer graphics from Cornell University, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo.
Advisors
Chuck Dietrich
Chuck is the CEO of SlideRocket. Previously, he was General Manager & Vice President, Salesforce Mobile, which mobilizes Salesforce CRM, custom, and Force.com applications so that mobile professionals are always connected to their critical information.
Dietrich also has responsibility for the companies strategic alliances with carriers and mobile device providers, including Apple, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Sprint and others.
Dietrich led Salesforce.com’s successful acquisition of Sendia in 2006, and has been with the company since 2000 in a variety of leadership roles including building salesforce.com’s consulting, marketing and product alliances programs and building out foreign distribution.
Dietrich holds a MBA from University of Utah.
David R Lazarony
David has always had an eye for graphics. At a young age he painted in his grandfather’s shadow; but when he saw his first Apple II with its dancing bright colored pixels, it was love at first sight.
After David graduated from Ohio State University in Electrical and Computer Engineering, he started his career of doing things that had never been done before. First it was writing Mac software for automated checkout machines way before their time. Next, it was bringing the smorgasbord-drawing program, Deneba Canvas from Mac to Windows. When he grew tired of just two dimensions, he ascended to the third with Adobe Dimensions. Then he brought new life to Adobe Illustrator, setting the industry standard. And finally, he herded all the disparate Adobe applications into the powerful Adobe Creative Suite.
After putting down his mouse, David decided to pick up his paint brush. But today the pixels are calling him back and he is using Ansca’s technology to share his visual art with the world.