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Santo Politi is a founder and General Partner of Spark Capital. His investments at Spark include thePlatform (acq'd by Comcast; NASDAQ:CMCSA) and KickApps.
Mr. Politi most recently was a General Partner at Charles River Ventures with an investment focus on media and entertainment infrastructure. His investments at CRV include Big Band Networks, Broadbus Technologies (acq'd by Motorola; NYSE:MOT) and Groove Mobile.
Prior to joining Charles River in early 2001, Mr. Politi served as President of New Media for Blockbuster Entertainment Inc. (NYSE:BBI), where he was responsible for establishing a new operating division focused on extending the company beyond its brick and mortar retail stores into digital broadcast and video on demand.
Before his work at Blockbuster, Mr. Politi co-founded BT Venture Partners, an early stage venture capital firm affiliated with Bankers Trust. Some of his successful investments at BT Venture Partners include Aether Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:AETH), Novatel Wireless, Inc. (NASDAQ: NVTL) and Digital Think (NASDAQ:DTHK; acq'd by Convergys; NYSE:CVG).
Mr. Politi has held various engineering and management positions with the Video Systems Division of Matsushita Electric Industrial in Osaka, Japan; Panasonic Broadcast and Television Systems Company and Weston Instruments, a subsidiary of Schlumberger Industries.
Mr. Politi holds an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in Electrical Engineering from NJIT and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Mr. Politi is fluent in Japanese, conversational in Spanish and French and is a native Turkish speaker. He is also the recipient of the EMMY Excellence in Technology Award as part of the Panasonic M.A.R.C. team. | 