Team

30+ years of SaaS/healthcare/operations expertise, three IPOs, thoughtful/strategic thinker

“Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen.” —Socrates

“We are building a new technology platform dedicated to making people feel connected, valued, and so much more significant than their employee id. We are on our way to simplifying all the departmental and point solutions and making the employee experience awesome and it starts with technology focused on serving the workforce first. Our employers are the single most important community in our lives after friends and family and offer amazing programs to assist us. My personal goal? Any one of us with invisible conditions like depression, dyslexia, diabetes, and all the other human conditions should feel safe to share it with colleagues without fear of discrimination, prejudice or favoritism. Hopefully Socrates.ai will bridge the gap between our jobs, our lives, and our company’s passion to support us.”

Results machine, contributed to two company IPOs, 20+ years of experience driving revenue, creating killer teams, and delighting customers

“Socrates.ai is game changing for people’s experience within the workplace. For years, things progressively have become so much easier from the way we get information outside of work—whether it’s buying movie tickets online or having products shipped instantaneously—it’s just simple. Socrates.ai enables that same experience in our work lives and so it’s hard not to be excited about how Socrates.ai is on a mission to make that happen for companies and change the way we work. I could not be more excited to be a part of not only Socrates.ai but to do it with such passionate people equally committed to changing the world!”

Expertise delivering enterprise and large-scale consumer products, led three startups to IPO or acquisition

“At Socrates.ai, we’re having an impact on an employee’s life at work by providing them an always-be-there buddy that puts needed information at their fingertips and performs mundane tasks on behalf of them happily, making their journey so rewarding. Building it in a way that can adapt itself to technological advances makes it even more interesting. Doing it with such a talented, open-minded, and energetic team at Socrates.ai is truly inspiring.”

Brian Ascher joined Venrock in 1998 as a Kauffman Fellow and is currently a partner based in Venrock’s Palo Alto office. Brian invests broadly across enterprise and consumer markets and currently serves on the Board of Directors of several companies, including Socrates.ai, 6Sense, Luxe, Beckon, SmartBiz Loans, Inrix, Personal Capital, and Dynamic Signal. Brian has been named to the Forbes Midas List multiple times, for the venture capitalists who have backed the most profitable winners in the last four years.

Scott Beechuk brings over 20 years of deep product management, engineering, and SaaS expertise to his role as a partner on Norwest’s enterprise team. He most recently served as senior vice president of product management for Salesforce Service Cloud, the leader of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant eight years in a row and #1 enterprise customer service platform. Service Cloud delivers $2.3 billion in annual revenue with over 1.5 million daily users and continues to grow at 28% per year. While at Salesforce, he also served as head of engineering, product, UX, and documentation for Desk.com. As Salesforce’s primary SMB customer support product, Desk.com serves startups such as Asana, Hotel Tonight, and Munchery.

Before joining Salesforce, Scott cut his entrepreneurial teeth building multiple consumer and enterprise software companies, including a multi-brand e-commerce service with an integrated multi-channel customer service platform, an enterprise privacy middleware platform, and consumer metasearch engine. Scott has served as an advisor and angel investor to several start-ups and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.

Scott holds seven U.S. patents. He earned a bachelor of science from the University of Michigan’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The Marketing Journal calls him “One of The Best Minds in Marketing,” Fast Company Magazine calls him a “Human Exclamation Point,” and The Economist calls him “off-putting to some.”

Christopher hosts the critically acclaimed Legends and Losers Podcast and is co-author of Harper Collins’s “instant classic,” Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets.

He was a Silicon Valley public company CMO three times (Mercury Interactive, Scient, Vantive), an entrepreneur, an advisor to over 50 technology startups, and is considered a “Godfather of category design.” Today he’s retired living happily ever after in Santa Cruz, California.

Brian is president and CEO of the National Business Group on Health, the nation’s only non-profit organization devoted exclusively to representing large employers’ perspective on national health policy issues and keeping employers on the leading edge of thought, innovation, and action to address health care cost and the delivery, financing, affordability, and consumer experience with the health care system. The Business Group leads initiatives to address the most relevant health care issues facing employers today and enables human resource and benefit leaders to learn, share, and leverage best practices to optimize business performance through health improvement and health care management. Business Group members, which include 75 Fortune 100 companies and over 420 companies in total, provide health coverage for more than 50 million U.S. workers, retirees, and their families.

Previously Brian was vice president of compensation and benefits at Honeywell International where he was responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of global total rewards, executive compensation, and the HR mergers and acquisitions process.

Aaron Au was the former Chief Technology Officer of SuccessFactors, an SAP Company. In that position, he was responsible for technology strategy and SAP Jam, the company’s social collaboration product. Since SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, he has also focused on the cloud platform strategy across the cloud portfolio. Prior to being one of the co-founders of SuccessFactors in 2001, Aaron learned about the needs of enterprise customers as GSS consultant at Aspect Telecommunications. He got his first taste of startup work at eAlity, where he built the next generation cloud platform for the company and managed the engineering team. He started his career as senior software engineer and project lead at Informix. Aaron holds a Bachelor of Arts in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Steve Strout is a recognized industry leader who brings a wealth of experience and knowledge from his extensive career in many CEO, CIO, and CTO roles. He is a strategist at heart and his background is rooted in many data and technology-intensive organizations such as New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Shred-it, America’s SAP Users’ Group (ASUG), BlackBerry, Sabre and Vonage. Steve is a published author and frequently requested speaker at many national and international conferences and webinars. Primary topics include business transformation, business strategy, agile product development, all things data, innovation, and leadership.

He is a National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) Fellow and is currently on the Advisory Board of Unifi Software and Applied Value Analytics.