Larry Roshfeld is Chief Marketing Officer at Approva Corporation, one of the few early-stage venture-backed deals funded during the "venture capital nuclear winter of 2002." Larry is a "product guy", with 19 years of experience in business strategy, development, marketing and sales of software products into global markets.

As with many people who fell into the PC industry during the early days, Larry’s career is perhaps best characterized as a series of random events, punctuated by the occasional stumble into incredibly good luck. Larry’s early educational career was highlighted by 12 consecutive years of report cards that included the teacher’s comment "not living up to his potential." Despite that, he someone managed to earn a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry (with a minor in Philosophy) from Clark University and a Master's degree in Counseling & Consulting Psychology from Harvard University. Even with the degrees, Larry still had no particularly good idea of what he wanted to do with his life. So he took a year off and traveled around the world. It didn’t resolve the problem, but did successfully delay it.

Upon returning to the States, Larry took a job working as a programmer (a skill he picked up while busy not attending classes in college) for a Cambridge software startup founded by 2 Harvard professors. Focused on PC-based interactive multimedia training systems in 1983, the company’s greatest contributions to the sum of human knowledge were to inexorably prove that some technologies are in fact WAY ahead of their time, and that academics do not necessarily make good business people.

After a blessedly short stint consulting at an insurance company in Hartford, Larry stumbled upon a little company called Lotus Development, and was hired into what Mitch Kapor only somewhat facetiously described as "The World’s First Marxist-Leninist Software Cooperative." Over the next 13 years, Larry served in a vast number of roles within Lotus, almost exclusively focused on 1-2-3, since, with the possible exception of Lotus Notes, branching out of the mainstream at Lotus was encouraged, but not typically rewarded with continued employment. By the way, Larry may be the only person ever employed by Lotus who does not take credit for the success of Notes.

After Lotus was acquired by IBM, Larry contemplated leaving, but was bribed to stay by being asked to "go off and figure out if we can make a business out of this Java stuff that Scott McNealy keeps talking about." A fun time was had by all, but in 1997, he finally left Lotus to try his hand at the exciting field of Supply Chain Management software. Not surprisingly, at least in retrospect, this was not as much fun as he would have liked. After a year spent helping to prove Augustine’s theory that "If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance", Larry once again succumbed to the siren call of the startup world.

In 1999, Larry joined Riverbed Technologies, focused on synchronization software for mobile devices. In one of those stereotypical stories of "The Bubble", Riverbed spent a few million of venture financing, and then a year later sold itself to Aether Systems (one of the pioneers of the wireless application space) for approximately $1.1billion (that’s "billion", with a "b") in stock. Needless to say, if valued today, the deal would not be worth anywhere near that much. After 18 months running the software products division at Aether, and learning first-hand about the trials and tribulations of the wireless space, Larry once again decided to join a startup.

Approva is developing a software product that will help company executives, auditors and board members monitor, analyze and audit compliance with business rules, government regulation, and internal policies and procedures. This is done by applying industry and company specific business rules to user access and user activity within enterprise applications. When not busy figuring out exactly how they are going to market and sell this stuff, Larry spends time with his wife and 3 kids (two teenage girls and an 8yr old boy), reads semi-voraciously, and participates/crews for charitable fundraising events.

February 6, 2003