LENNY HEROLD

Gryphon Ventures provides advisory services directly to private equity firms and their portfolio companies, specializing in product and technology. Services include:

• Portfolio company engagement with executives and technologists, advising on product, architecture, infrastructure, security, software development and organizational best practices
• Talent acquisition support (CTOs, VPs of Product and Engineering, Architects, Engineers, DevOps)
• Buy- and sell-side due diligence support, including pre- and post-LOI
• Value creation initiatives post-close
• Fixed-scope assessments and advisory projects

Advise executive leadership and the development team on product roadmap initiatives, go-to-market strategy, architecture and cloud infrastructure.

Crosslake is the M&A industry’s leading technology advisory firm, maximizing investment return for our customers by de-risking acquisitions, accelerating tech initiatives during the hold period and preparing portfolio companies for exit.

• Key contributor in the development of a proprietary IT due diligence methodology
• Serve as primary subject matter expert for infrastructure and security on over 500 due diligence assessments
• Advise investors, boards of directors and executives on topics including remediation planning, process improvements, infrastructure transformation and consolidation, compliance and restructuring
• Act as primary product owner for in-house application development
• Manage sprints, act as scrum master, and maintain product roadmap
• Manage a multidisciplinary team of technologists including DevOps engineers, developers, systems and application architects, and project managers
• Provide architect-level expertise on best practices for architecture and application deployments on various cloud and managed hosting providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Softlayer and others
• Represent the company in various contexts including public speaking engagements, sales and sales engineering support, and partner and vendor relationship management

• Spearheaded a project to consolidate the Promotions.com and TheStreet.com datacenters, which reduced datacenter footprint from 44 cabinets to 12, saving approximately $1.5M in the first year
• Oversaw the complete conversion from physical Solaris servers to virtualized systems running on Linux, which dramatically improved scalability, performance and redundancy
• Streamlined IT support and deployment processes to significantly increase uptime and established SLAs with internal stakeholders to improve confidence in the infrastructure and support teams
• Initiated the company's first successful cloud deployment on Amazon Web Services

• Led the infrastructure team, which was responsible for maintenance of the company's datacenter footprint of approximately 200 systems as well as various cloud deployments
• Launched an optimized and scalable platform for online promotions which supported some of the largest campaigns ever executed, including the McDonald's Monopoly game from 2006-2013
• Oversaw both the consolidation and subsequent separation of the company's datacenter infrastructure during the sale to and repurchase from TheStreet.com
• Facilitated the eventual sale of the business to ePrize (now HelloWorld), including support of the diligence exercise as well as the post-sale technology transition

• Managed a team of infrastructure engineers that was responsible for the complete rearchitecture and rebuild of the company's datacenter, network and 150+ servers
• Successfully facilitated the technology migrations for several mergers and acquisitions including Seventeen.com, Gardenweb.com and Gurl.com
• Supported the infrastructure through the sale of the company to NBC Universal for ~$600M, and worked with the transition team to ensure continuity throughout the following year