Management Team
Folio3′s management team consists of seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists and managers with extensive work experience gained at blue-chip, high-tech companies.
Umair Khan, Chairman
Umair is the founder of Folio3. He co-founded Clickmarks Inc., a Silicon Valley based enterprise software company. As CEO, Umair grew the company through $27 million in venture funding from among others, DFJ-Eplanet, Mitsubishi, and Vodafone Ventures, and oversaw its acquisition in July 2005 by Semotus Inc., a publicly traded US company. Umair served as COO of Semotus through May 2006 before leaving to join The Entrepreneurs’ Fund III, a Silicon Valley based venture capital fund, as Venture Partner.
Umair is also founder and chairman of Verisium (www.verisium.com), a Silicon Valley based software testing tools company founded in 2004. Prior to this, Umair was founder and chairman of Wordwalla Inc., a venture backed company providing multilingual software solutions. Wordwalla was acquired in 2001 by Morisawa Corporation, a public company in Japan. He is also co-founder of Chowk, a niche portal focusing on South Asia. Umair started his career as part of the Itanium microprocessor group at Intel Corporation.
Umair founded OPEN (Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs) Silicon Valley, an organization that promotes and fosters Entrepreneurship. He has spoken on entrepreneurship at some of the country’s top business schools, including MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley. He has been profiled in publications such as USA Today, New York Times, and The Entrepreneur. Umair received a BS in Mathematics (1992) and an MS in Computer Engineering (1995), both from MIT, where in 1991 he was elected by the Department of Mathematics as an institutional nominee to the Mathematical Association of America.
Adnan Lawai, Chief Executive Officer
Adnan is a seasoned technologist and entrepreneur with extensive experience in product development, sales, business development and marketing. Prior to Folio3, Adnan was Chief Technology Officer at Clickmarks, a venture backed company focused on providing a rapid, cost effective solution for performing integration and wireless enablement of enterprise applications. At Clickmarks, Adnan was responsible for defining and executing on the technical direction of the company as well as its key technical sales and marketing activities, including its alliances with Sun Microsystems and Plumtree Software. Before Clickmarks, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Silicon Graphics (SGI), where he worked on Digital Media, Advanced Graphics, and led SGI’s involvement at the MPEG-4 forum.
Adnan has also worked at General Instrument (now part of Motorola) and as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab on digital video and on advanced modem design. He has a BS and a MS in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Naveed Qazi, VP of Engineering
Naveed is a seasoned software engineer and manager. Before Folio3, Naveed was at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego CA, a Fortune500 wireless technology and services company. At Qualcomm, Naveed was involved with the BREW system of mobile handset applications software and content download server ecosystem. He led a team for development of core products targeting rich User Interfaces for the mobile handset. He has led teams in integration and test of handset APIs as well as download server ecosystems and web-based B2B applications. Before that, he was involved with software tools development for the Globalstar system of satellite phones. Prior to Qualcomm, Naveed worked for Veritas and Centerline Software in Mountain View CA, on their software tools product lines.
Naveed received a BS in EE from UET, Lahore, and an MS in Computer Engineering from Purdue University (1993).
Salman Azhar, Executive Consultant
Salman is a seasoned entrepreneur with a stellar education background. He has demonstrated success in forming, inspiring, and leading in 100+ projects & 50+ teams across diverse industries in 13 countries. Some of his former clients/employers include: Sony, HP, Oracle, ADP, i2, Agilent, UPS.
Salman has attained a Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke. He has created new programs at Duke and Rose-Hulman, published 9 papers and is a regularly invited lecturer at the Stanford MBA program.
When Salman is not out leading the technology industry, or a startup, he is a prolific amateur chess organizer in the US.
