Don Aquilano

Don’s tenacity and entrepreneurial drive exhibited itself early in his career, when he was so frustrated that Hewlett Packard had come on campus his senior year solely to recruit electrical engineers (as a production and operations management major, he was more of an industrial engineer) that he accosted the recruiter in the hallway and refused to let him leave until he'd managed to secure a job offer.

After working as an operations manager in Hewlett Packard’s Circuit Technology Group, serving on the corporate-wide team responsible for the selection of a new ERP system, and having co-founded two small software companies along the way, Don left HP for business school. Upon graduation, he joined The Boston Consulting Group as a consultant, and then Diageo, where he was a manager of strategy for Guinness Americas and Caribbean (he assures us that testing the product was not part of his job responsibilities, but merely a perk).

He first moved into the venture capital world with the Fox Group in New York, where he participated in the early funding of companies including WebMD, before being recruited to join Gazelle TechVentures as its second managing director in April 2000. Gazelle was ranked in the top quartile for venture funds nationally for its 2000 vintage, and Don participated in all of the firm's successful investments, including Rubicon Technology (NASDAQ:RBCN), a former Russell 2000 company, where he served as executive chairman. And five years after meeting John, who was serving on the executive committee at Gazelle, Don agreed to join Blue Chip as a managing director, where he managed investments in software and services companies Aprimo and Intradiem.

Don has served on the advisory boards of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Centers for IU and Ball State, and is Chairman Emeritus of the advisory board for Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing. Don is a frequent lecturer at IU, Notre Dame, Butler University and has twice taught the Entrepreneurship capstone course at Purdue University.