Serra Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm investing in technology companies in emerging Midwest technology centers and selected other geographies. Sectors we focus on include information technology, devices/instrumentation and agricultural technologies.

Stephen was an early-stage, lead investor and Director of Baidu. Baidu is China's leading technology company providing Chinese language web search. With over a $40b market capitalization, Baidu now offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike, an online collaboratively built encyclopedia, and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum.[

PayStand empowers anyone to take credit card payments online, even without a merchant account. Like Square for online transactions, PayStand helps independent merchants quickly, easily and effectively sell online.

IOVOX is a global leader in cloud analytics for business communications. IOVOX analytics platform is trusted by leading global brands and more than 300,000 small businesses around the world, empowering marketers and operational managers with transformative business insight.

Bridging the gap between big data genomics and individualized health management, Interpreta is re-imagining individualized patient care using real-time clinical and genomic analytics to streamline workflow, prevent disease, customize care, circumvent adverse events and restore the personal relationship between physician and patient.

MarketRiders, Inc. is an online investment services company, built around E.Adviser technology, an easy-to use online service that allows anyone to now join the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) revolution using strategies previously only available to elite investors and large endowments like Yale and Harvard. For $9.95 per month and 30 minutes each quarter, anyone can build and manage their own ETF portfolio and grow their money like the world’s smartest investors.

Successful exit to Rallyware

Ritchey is a leading privately-held bicycle compoment company led by legendary Tom Ritchey, of of the "inventors" of the sport of mountain biking. At Ritchey, Mr. Beck helps develop future products and analyze business opportunity.

Stephen was a General Partner in this super-angel venture firm, that amongst other things, was the first and leading investor in Baidu, the Google of China.

Hydration Technology is the developer of the most advanced form of water and wastewater filtration membrane technology in the world. HTI has more than twenty years experience in research and development of advanced separation membrane manufacturing, and water filtration and recycling. HTI is the global leader and pioneer in the manufacture of commercial Forward Osmosis (FO) membrane material, and a global leader in membrane filtration wastewater treatment systems integration and installation.

Fios is the leading e-discovery legal service utilizing technology and industry knowledge to unearth critical data for any pending legal matter. Fios partners with a number of world-class e-discovery software partners, combining their best-in-class technologies with Fios' expertise to deliver accelerated review times, better quality production, and tighter cost control.

Since 1996, RuleSpace has been a world leader in Web content categorization products and services. In October 2010 RuleSpace was acquired by Symantec enabling even greater protection, service and value to our customers and partners. Our OEM solutions are used to power Parental Controls for Mobile Operators and ISPs, URL filtering for consumer and enterprise Web Security Solutions, and contextual advertising solutions for hundreds of millions of users around the world.The latest Symantec RuleSpace Web Categorization Solution offers a unique combination of both comprehensive URL category databases and real-time Web page analysis providing the best possible category results to our partner's products.

Maxager Technology aims to maximize customers' returns in manufacturing, sales, and marketing. Its applications allow plant managers to boost manufacturing performance by optimizing short-term product flows and by evaluating long-term decisions about production capacity. Maxager also offers products that help sales and marketing managers make pricing decisions and determine which products, market sectors, and customers are most profitable. The company also provides related services such as consulting, support, training, maintenance, and installation. Maxager was founded in 1996.

RespondTV made it possible for TV viewers to click on a commercial with a remote control and purchase the advertised product. RespondTV partnered with and eventually merged with AT&T.

Synteleos, merged with Guru Networks, is a transaction management solutions provider, bringing a complete real estate brokerage and transaction management solution to the broker marketplace.

Inktomi was the world's leading web search provider. At Inktomi, Stephen lead business development for portal relationships seeking to integrate product search and shopping technologies.

C2B (Consumer-to-Business) Technologies was a leader in product search technologies, crawling, indexing and making searchable the Web's catalogue of products. C2B was acquired by Inktomi (NASDAQ: INKT) in 1998.

CCS (California Cheap Skates) is the world's leading action sports brick-and-mortar and online retailer. While managing Central Coast Surfboards in the 1984, Stephen approached then owners, Jim Hall and Mike Chaney, with the concept of a new type of mail-order company. Since then, the company has grown and undergone several acquisitions and is currently operated by Footlocker.