Managing Partner, SoftTech

Based in Palo Alto (CA), Jean-Francois "Jeff" Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, a firm doing angel investments and providing consulting services to early stage consumer Internet startups. Jeff will typically get involved as an advisor, board member or part-time executive, focusing on business development, fund raising, and strategy matters.

His current areas of interests include next generation search, social media (blogging, syndication, aggregation), and open source. These are also the primary topics covered on his blog, Software Only - alongside venture capital, startup and industry news, conferences,...

Jeff has spent over sixteen years in the software market, as an entrepreneur, a senior executive and a venture capitalist. Throughout his career, he got exposed to the global market: leading development teams in Europe and on Wall Street, designing products that were sold internationally and investing in software infrastructure startups across the USA and Europe.

Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff was the President of RVC Capital, the firm managing the Reuters Greenhouse Fund – the Corporate Venture arm of Reuters that has invested $560M in 82 companies since 1994, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com, Infoseek,… As the Partner in charge of US Operations, Jeff’s focus was on investing and managing the US portfolio, as well as supporting all companies in their commercial and business development efforts. Jeff’s Board involvements included UltraDNS (CA), Tacit (CA) and Pathfire (GA). He was also involved in a number of other portfolio companies: Moreover (UK), Bitpipe (MA), PacketVideo (CA), SpiritSoft (UK), Epicentric (CA), Kinecta (CA), GiantBear (NY) and Epoch Partners (CA).

Jeff joined the Venture arm of Reuters from its product development division, where he was leading the development of the Risk Management and Desktop unit. He had direct responsibly for 250+ staff in Paris, London and New-York, developing a number of leading front and middle office products: the ATW suite of Unix applications, the Kondor+ Risk Management offering, and the flagship Reuters Desktop Kobra/3000 Xtra, that he designed back in 1993. Jeff became instrumental in the development of the Reuters Open Systems product line since the early 1990’s, after its acquisition of Effix Systems, the Paris-based early stage startup company he joined in 1989.