Team

Merrick Furst

Founder and Director
Distinguished Professor, Georgia Tech

Merrick is the founder of Flashpoint.  He is Georgia Tech’s first distinguished professor of computing.  As associate dean he invented and developed the highly regarded Threads curriculum and ran new venture creation in the College of Computing.  Merrick is a co-founder of the internet security firm Damballa and an early-stage fund investor.  Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Merrick was the founder and CEO of Essential Surfing Gear, an Internet software company that provided technology to bring information to people as they browsed the web. Merrick grew the company to 53 employees with customers including Barnes and Noble, CNET and MySimon until it was acquired. Merrick was also at the University of California at Berkeley, where he served as president and director of the International Computer Science Institute and helped establish its Center for Internet Research.  Prior to Berkeley, Merrick was a professor and associate dean in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Merrick is an inventor, recipient of the first Presidential Young Investigator Award in computer science, and creator of multiple commercially-successful software artifacts, including electronic post-it notes, which were best-sellers on PCs.

Elli Kaplan

COO

Elli has a range of experience in startups, angel investing, finance and politics. A Harvard Business School grad, Elli has worked everywhere from the White House, the US Treasury Department, Goldman Sachs, the United Nations and Activate3D before joining Flashpoint.