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.
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 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.
Mr. DeNuccio is the Founder and General Partner of Wild West Capital LLC since 2012 where he focused on angel investments, primarily in SAAS software start-ups.
He brings to Marathon more than 25 years of experience as a chief executive, global sales leader, public and private board member, and more than a dozen angel investments, managing and growing leading technology businesses. He served in senior executive positions with Verizon, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Redback Networks, Wang Laboratories and Unisys Corporation.
He recently served as Executive Chairman and major investor of SevOne, a Bain Capital company, since 2017, until its sale to Turbonomics in November 2019. Prior to that, he was Director, Chief Executive Officer and President at NYSE listed Violin Memory from 2014 to 2017, restructured the company and sold it to the largest bondholder the Soros Group, in April 2017.
Prior to that, Mr. DeNuccio served as Director and Chief Executive Officer of Metaswitch Networks from 2010 to 2012, a Sequoia Capital company, where he migrated the company headquarters from London to San Francisco and re-developed its product offerings to SAAS for growth in a Software Defined World of Networking. Metaswitch was sold to Microsoft in 2020 for its SAAS offerings.
He also served as the Director, President and Chief Executive Officer at Nasdaq listed Redback Networks from 2001 to 2006, where he led the company successfully through a major restructuring, renewed growth, and ultimately a $2.1B sale. Sold to L.M. Ericsson in 2006, the transaction represented one of the highest sales multiples of its time, and a 100% stock premium.
Earlier in his career, he served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Service Provider Operations, Worldwide Channels, and Worldwide Sales Operations with Cisco Systems Inc., from August 1995 to August 2001. At Cisco, he was one of the first 10 VP’s and one of the first promoted to Senior Vice President. At Cisco he hired over 3000 people, managed over 5000 people worldwide, and led the Service Provider Division revenue growth from $500 Million to nearly $8 Billion in annual revenue in a 4-year run.
Mr. DeNuccio has served on the Public Board of Juniper Networks since February 2014, and Calix since October 2012. He is an Angel Investor and Board Member of Zededa and an Angel Investor in Theatro, Deeyook, Byogy and Q-Sensei. He also previously served as a public Director of SanDisk Corp. and a Director of JDS Uniphase Corp.
He holds a BSBA with Honors in Finance from Northeastern University and served on its Board from 2012 to 2018. He also holds his MBA with Honors from Columbia University.
Jay Leupp is the managing partner of Terra Firma Asset Management, LLC. Prior to co-founding Terra Firma, Mr. Leupp served as a managing director in various roles at Lazard Asset Management, Grubb & Ellis Alesco Global Advisors, RBC Capital Markets and Robertson Stephens & Co. During his career, he has also held positions at The Staubach Company, Trammell Crow Company, and KPMG Peat Marwick. Mr. Leupp is also a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and serves on the boards of both non-profit and corporate organizations. Mr. Leupp earned a Bachelor of Science in business administration from Santa Clara University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.