Theodore G. Scardamalia
Principal

Mr. Scardamalia has over 40 years of experience in assembling highly skilled, small teams to deliver products with minimal resources in both dollars and manpower. He has proven leadership and communication skills in large corporations, fast growing companies and start-up companies. His abilities earned the recognition from a top accounting firm, making him a 2000 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year candidate. His background encompasses both technical, management, and business positions in PCB design, ASIC chip development, microprocessor chip development, high performance commercial and scientific parallel systems (hardware and software), CAD systems development, competitive analysis, product pricing, and business planning.

Mr. Scardamalia built a notable 24-year career with IBM in semiconductor chip and computer systems product development. His experienced spanned multiple technologies and product designs from ASIC chips to high performance parallel computer systems. He directed the circuit design team that designed and implemented the first 32 bit RISC Micro-processor in 1980. He also managed a 75-person design team across 2 labs, that defined, designed, verified and released the CPU/system chip set for the Low-End RS/6000 workstation. He also negotiated a common set of requirements with 5 world-wide development laboratories for digital signal processors (DSPs).

Post IBM, Mr. Scardamalia managed product development teams for multiple start-ups. Initially managing the successful development of a multi-processing DSP. Subsequently, he directed a 24 person team, from 7 different contract companies, to successfully implement a fully integrated MPEG2 video/audio decoder chip (including the cards for test).

In 1999, Mr. Scardamalia raised $15.6M in equity funding and $5M in debt financing, and founded Times N Systems (TNS) to develop a high performance computational and storage system. Under his leadership as Chairman and CEO, TNS developed the system that included multiple PCBs, FPGA designs, and 1.5M lines of code. The system protype was debuted at Supercomputing 2000. TNS secured seven issued patents with 12 pending patents. Unfortunately, TNS went to market 1 month prior to 9/11/2001.

After Times N Systems, Mr. Scardamalia joined Portelligent, the start-up company that began the business of analyzing high volume, consumer electronics. While many companies analyzed their competitors’ products, Portelligent provided detailed reports on a wide variety of products, numbering 100 to 120 products per year. These reports detailed the architecture of the device, all of the semiconductor in the device, as well as all of the active and passive components in the device. This fed into a detailed cost analysis yielding the “cost to manufacture” the device. Mr. Scardamalia served as the Director of Product Analysis, specializing in developing the “cost to manufacture” estimates.

In his off hours, Scardamalia has worked with numerous charitable organizations. He not only served on the Board of Directors as both a member and past president for Marywood, a family planning and adoption center, but he and his wife cared for newborn babies as foster parents. For a hobby, he races his sailboat on the weekends.