David Gardner is a serial entrepreneur, writer, adviser and very early stage investor with over twenty-five years of experience in creating and building software technology companies. As an investor, he is one of most active angel investors in the Triangle with over seven million currently deployed in early stage ventures. As an adviser, Gardner spends most of his time working as a full-time unpaid coach and mentor to several companies usually in the B2B software sector. As an entrepreneur, he has been the founder or co-founded of multiple successful companies in the Triangle including ProviderLink, Report2Web, DBBasics, OnSphere and PeopleClick which was recently purchased for $100 million. The start ups he founded raised over $75 million in venture capital. He has demonstrated a record for consistency across multiple industries and markets with seven successful exits in a row. As a senior executive, he served as a Vice President for Compuware, a Fortune 1000 corporation, after it acquired ProviderLink, a healthcare communications exchange Gardner founded. As a thought leader, he has published several forward thinking white papers and articles on technical, marketing and managerial topics. Gardner founded and launched the first hosted “software as a service” enterprise application in NC long before the SaaS model was recognized as a viable architecture or best practice. Gardner is the author of a book on entrepreneurship called, The Start Up Hats. As a lifelong learner, he is constantly researching new technologies and challenging traditional ways of thinking. In addition to several years of full time computer science and business related post graduate studies at NCSU, Mr. Gardner holds degrees in Music and Philosophy with a post graduate concentration in theology and dead languages.