Brian R. Smith

Brian found and serves as the managing director of S3 Ventures, a venture capital firm with $450M under management. S3 invests primarily in Texas and the southwest in Series A, B and C opportunities, and restructurings and smaller buyouts. At age 29, he founded and served as chairman and CEO of Crossroads Systems (Nasdaq: CRDS). He led Crossroads through five rounds of venture, strategic and mezzanine financing and to a successful IPO in 1999. Brian ran Crossroads as a public company for nearly four years. In this role, Brian was an early pioneer in Storage Area Networks (“SANs”), which are industry standard solutions today. For his efforts, he was awarded the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2000. He spent the first seven years of his career in electrical engineering positions holding product development roles within the Technology Group of the IBM Corporation.

Brian earned a BSEE with honors from the University of Cincinnati and an MSEE from Purdue University. He served on the board of Crossroads Systems (Nasdaq: CRDS), Favor (acquired by HEB Grocery), Gravitant (acquired by IBM), LibreDigital (acquired by RRD), Packet Design (acquired by Ciena), Phurnace (acquired by BMC Software), Sipera System (acquired by Avaya, Inc,), StoredIQ (acquired by IBM) and TVA Medical (acquired by Becton Dickinson). He currently serves on the boards of Acessa Health, Alkami, Briggo, Datical, OrthoAccel, Pivot3, Qualia, Tango Health and VUV Analytics.