BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Merrick Okamoto
Executive Chairman
Mr. Merrick D. Okamoto has served as Executive Chairman, CEO, and as a director of the Company since August 2017. Mr. Okamoto also serves as the President at Viking Asset Management, LLC (“Viking”) which he co-founded in 2002. He is responsible for research, due diligence and structuring potential investment opportunities for the Longview Family of Funds. Mr. Okamoto has been instrumental in providing capital to over 200 private and public companies and he is responsible for Viking’s trading operations. He served as the Chairman of Optex Systems Holdings, Inc., from January 2013 to November 2014, and as its director from March 2009 to November 2014. He currently serves as an Executive Director at Embark Corporation.
Prior to Viking, Mr. Okamoto co-founded TradePortal.com, Inc., in 1999 (“TradePortal”) and served as its President until 2001. He was instrumental in developing the proprietary Trade Matrix software platform offered by TradePortal Securities. Mr. Okamoto’s negotiations were key in selling a minority stake in TradePortal to Thomson Financial. Prior to TradePortal, Mr. Okamoto had been employed in the securities industry since 1983. He served as Vice President at Shearson Lehman Brothers, Prudential Securities and Paine Webber. Mr. Okamoto founded First Stage Capital, Inc. in 1996, which advises Public and Private Companies on business matters. Mr. Okamoto is widely recognized as an advanced securities trader specializing in short-term trading with sector momentum and has extensive experience in technical market analysis techniques. From 1987 to 1990, Mr. Okamoto hosted the television program, The Income Report. He has been featured as a guest speaker on CNN and the McNeil/Lehrer Report.
FRED THIEL
Chief Executive Officer
Prior to serving as Marathon’s chief executive officer, Thiel co-founded and served as chairman of Sprocket, a blockchain and cryptocurrency technology and financial services company whose mission is to reduce the risk and friction of cryptocurrency trading across marketplaces, regions and exchanges by establishing a federation of exchanges that together create a single aggregated global trading marketplace with large scale liquidity, rapid execution, minimal counter-party risk, and price transparency. Prior to that, Thiel served as chairman and chief executive officer of Local Corporation, an $80 million Nasdaq-listed leader in online local search and digital media, mobile search monetization and programmatic retargeting markets with over 240 million unique annual visitors.
During his career while holding the title of CEO across multiple companies, Thiel successfully created in excess of $750 million in shareholder value, efficiently raised more than $150 million through both public (IPO and secondary offerings) and private capital sources, led multiple successful corporate transformations resulting in highly accretive exits, built high output agile product development organizations, and established corporate innovation groups resulting in the creation of new product businesses that generated significant new revenues in their first year.
GEORGES ANTOUN
Director
Georges Antoun brings to Marathon over 30 years of operational and technical experience, having served in various leadership positions at several global technology companies, including as a member of the board of directors of two publicly traded companies: Ruckus Wireless, Inc. and Violin Memory, Inc. He currently serves as the president of First Solar where he was chief operating officer before being appointed to president, U.S. in July 2015. Prior to joining First Solar, Mr. Antoun served as a venture partner at Technology Crossover Ventures (“TCV”), a private equity and venture firm, which he joined in July 2011. Before joining TCV, he was the head of product area IP & broadband networks for Ericsson. Mr. Antoun joined Ericsson in 2007, when Ericsson acquired Redback Networks, a telecommunications equipment company, where Mr. Antoun served as the senior vice president of worldwide sales & operations. After the acquisition, Mr. Antoun was promoted to chief executive officer of the Redback Networks subsidiary. Prior to Redback Networks, Mr. Antoun spent five years at Cisco Systems, where he served as vice president of worldwide systems engineering and field marketing, vice president of worldwide optical operations, and vice president of carrier sales. Prior to Cisco, he was the director of systems engineering at Newbridge Networks, a data and voice networking company. Mr. Antoun started his career as a member of the technical staff at NYNEX (now Verizon Communications), where he was part of the company’s science and technology division. Mr. Antoun earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a master’s in information systems engineering from NYU Poly.