David Kirk - Former Senior Vice President, AOL, Cisco, & Entrepreneur

David was born in Belfast in 1950, and has been in the computer and networking industries for more than 35 years.

After obtaining a BSc (with Honors) in Computer Science, in Leicester, England, he worked for Rolls-Royce, IBM and Amdahl.

In 1983 he moved to California and over the next two decades, he worked at the VP level in a number of telecommunications and software companies. 

In 1995, he joined America Online as a Vice President – then a young start-up that was the smallest online services company – behind CompuServe, Prodigy and Genie.  While at AOL, he managed the development and implementation of technology for AOL’s international joint ventures with Bertelsmann, Mitsui and Nikkei, and led a team that successfully launched every international service – Europe, Japan, Latin America, Hong Kong and Australia.  He was also asked to form a team to develop, operate and manage AOL’s business systems; customer warehouse, corporate information and reporting, billing systems, payment systems, fraud prevention and protection, ecommerce and internet advertising.

In 1999 he accepted a position as interim CEO of Telepost, Inc. a young unified telecommunication company.  He successfully launched their unified voice/email service worldwide, before being recruited by Cisco Systems as SVP for their software division.  He was then asked to take responsibility for the software applications products, and launched their Business Communications Group – focused on Call Center platforms, Unified Communications, and Voice over IP (VoIP) for enterprises.

David is now “retired”, but remains very actively involved with the computing and networking industries through affiliations with leading VC firms, interim executive assignments, board and board advisory roles, and private equity investment.

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