 Jonathan Aberman
I’m currently Managing Director of Amplifier Venture Partners, a seed and early stage venture capital fund making investments in the Mid-Atlantic and Managing Director of Amplifier Networks, a community focused on technology entrepreneurs. I founded Amplifier in 2005, after a career as a corporate and venture capital lawyer with some of the leading technology law firms in the US. Prior to being a lawyer I was an investment banker, arbitrage trader and economist in London, England.
In addition to my roles at Amplifier, I am also an Adjunct Professor at American University and University of Maryland in their respective schools of business and management. I have a leadership role with many organizations in the Mid-Atlantic that focus on technology commercialization, start ups and entrepreneurship.
When I am relaxing I enjoy playing one of my electric guitars too loudly, watching one of my favorite sports teams lose in painful fashion and reading far too much science fiction and current political history.
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Eric Koefoot
Eric is an experienced software executive and an Internet pioneer, having either founded or served as a senior executive for early-stage Internet companies since 1996. He was most recently the founding CEO and Publisher of U.S. News Ventures, a branded internet publishing company funded in part by U.S. News & World Report. Prior to that role, he was co-founder and CEO of Five Star Alliance, a successful eCommerce startup in Alexandria, which became the largest independent booker of luxury hotels worldwide and was sold in 2007 for over a 10X return to investors in less than 3 years.
For almost 7 years before that, Eric served in various executive roles at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), including CFO, VP of Business Development, VP of Strategy, VP of Operations and Technology, and then quite successfully as the VP of Sales for the division. Prior to WPNI, he worked for 9 years as a financial executive in product development at Ford Motor Company, consulted at Deloitte Consulting, and founded a startup company, PrimeSource, which provided financial and strategic consulting services to Fortune 500 clients. Eric has an engineering degree from M.I.T. and an MBA from the Sloan School at M.I.T.
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 Pat Lovenhart
Pat Lovenhart is a marketing professional and focus group moderator. She established Lovenhart Research & Consulting to utilize her knowledge and skills in managing both qualitative and quantitative research and in proposal creation and evaluation for a variety of clients. Pat is also President of the American Marketing Association’s DC Chapter which serves over 900 members and is the third largest AMA chapter.
Pat chairs and serves on grant review teams for various Department of Health & Human Services Office of Community Services’ programs. She has been an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and American University. Recent clients include Walter Reed Army Hospital; the Community HealthCorps, an AmeriCorps program; and in collaboration with other consultants, a major professional hair salon products manufacturer and an export-import association.
Prior to consulting, Pat held the position of Senior Analyst at Peter D. Hart Research Associates, where she specialized in media, marketing, and public relations research and dealt with a range of public policy, advocacy, and crisis management issues for diverse clients—from major corporations such as AT&T, Fannie Mae, and Cargill, to coalitions and associations, such as Weber-McGinn, Cattlemen’s, GSD&M Advertising, O’Hare Airport, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Newseum.
Before joining Hart, Pat was a marketing research project director for more than twelve years at AT&T and Lucent Technologies, supporting marketing, product and market development, advertising and promotions, and strategy and planning in the U.S. and internationally. Pat helped foster a customer focus in areas such as segmentation, wireless, convergence, competitive pricing, sales channel strategy and branding and was instrumental in branding one of Lucent’s best selling wireless enterprise business systems—TransTalk (now Avaya’s system).
Pat holds an MBA in Marketing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She serves on the Board of Directors for Association of Women in Communications (AWC) DC and received this organization’s 2006 Star Award. She is on a Marketing Research Association task force and the AMA 2007 Nonprofit Marketing Conference Committee, and is a member of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association, Washington Women in Public Relations, the Writers Center and DC Web Women. Pat’s articles have appeared in AWC’s Matrix, AMA-DC’s Insight, and on the fiftyandfurthermore website.
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