About Us
» Charles Hudson, Host
» Susan Wu, Special Advisor
Charles Hudson, Host, Virtual Goods Summit
Charles is a Manager for New Business Development at Google, focused on developing new partnership opportunities for the company's early-stage products in the advertising, mobile, and e-commerce markets. Prior to joining Google, Charles was a Product Manager for IronPort Systems, a leading provider of anti-spam hardware appliances. Earlier in his career, Charles
was a Sr. Associate with In-Q-Tel, the strategic venture capital group for the Central Intelligence Agency. In his role as a Senior Associate, Charles covered the information security sector, with a focus on identifying investment opportunities with the potential to deliver significant value to the CIA and the commercial market in the short and long term.Charles holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and Spanish from Stanford University. In addition to his work at Google, Charles is on the Advisory Board for BizWorld, a non-profit focused on educating students about business, and the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, a non-profit focused on connecting entrepreneurs, ideas, and capital.
Susan Wu, Special Advisor, Virtual Goods Summit
Susan joined Charles River Ventures with 12 years of operating experience working with early stage technology ventures. Susan is a member and the former CMO of the Apache Software Foundation, one of the world's most influential open source software organizations. Susan's roots in the open source community stems from her long-abiding interest in how technology catalyzes social and economic change. She began her career as the chief architect of an early massively multiplayer online game and has remained active in online gaming. She was the Executive Producer of GXMod, a widely popular, award winning Quake 2 enhancement. Susan also contributed to components of the open source Nebula 3D graphics and game engine.Prior to her work at Apache, Susan was the VP of Strategic Alliances for Predictive Systems, a NASDAQ-listed security services firm that was acquired by International Network Services (INS) in 2003. Susan also served as the VP of Strategic Development for Opus360, a provider of on demand human resources and project management solutions. Susan co-authored Opus360's business plan, led business development activities, and helped steer the company to a public offering in 2000. Prior to Opus360, Susan was the Director of Development at USWeb/CKS, where she led the development and design of some of the world's first community-centric consumer Internet businesses.
Susan received her BA from Tufts University and an MBA with distinction from Cornell University, where she was a Park Fellow and a Bristol Myers Squibb Fellow.
