Sarah Carpenter 

Sarah, a native of Norway, has 19 years of professional and executive experience with both large global and smaller local Silicon Valley organizations. Consistently on the finance and accounting side of the house, she has lead teams in organizations as diverse as an energy company to a large international software company and a venture capital supported technology start up organization. She has both public and private company experience building and managing complex and multi national budgets and strategic plans. Always partnering with various stakeholders within the organization to ensure alignment of their financial targets and operational requirements fit within the overall strategy and goals of the company. Sarah’s keen analytical sense as well as practical operational experience, provides for a driven and experienced leader with excellent communication skills.  Furthermore, her work throughout the years managing to various financial goals provides for strategic understanding of any overarching framework while not losing sight of the details critical for success.

Adiba Cremonini

Executive Director 

Adiba is the Executive Director of Silicon Vikings. She has an extensive background from the Swedish Innovation ecosystem, working for 13 years with several Science Parks and incubators including Kista Sicence City and STING. Adiba´s work is and has always been a great passion for creating sustainable networking platforms and PR projects around the different players in an innovation environment.

Adiba has also, through her own company, Startup Communication, had the great opportunity to work with hundreds of startup companies in how to build their brand and communicate successfully from start. She is also the initiator and developer of several projects strengthening Sweden´s brands as an innovative country worldwide. The last project that brought her to Silicon Valley, prior to joining Silicon Vikings, was the launch of Innovative Sweden, a world tour exhibition and program promoting Sweden as an innovative country by showcasing a new generation of Swedish innovations.

Eilif Trondsen 

Chair, SIG Entrepreneurship & Learning

Eilif Trondsen is Research Director at Strategic Business Insights (SBI)in Menlo Park, California. The focus area of Dr. Trondsen’s research and consulting at SBI (formerly Stanford Research Institute) is the use of technology for innovation, learning and performance improvement. He has 32 years' experience at SBI and at SRI International, leading or contributing to a variety of projects for U.S. and foreign clients in the private and public sectors. At SRI and SBI, Dr. Trondsen has held the position of Research Director of the Business Intelligence Program, the director of the Learning on Demand program, and has also led SBI’s research initiative around 3D immersive technologies. In his tenure at SRI and SBI, he has given numerous presentations and autored many publications on various eCommerce, eLearning, innovation and virtual-worlds topics.

Helene Åström

CFO

Helene Astrom, has during her 15 years in the finance profession had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of businesses, from automotive manufacturing, software, professional services to healthcare.  Having worked as Finance Manager, Controller and CFO, amongst other positions, has given her a solid knowledge in areas as accounting, processes, business analysis to strategic decision making. She has a professional history of managing financial functions and being part of the executive management team.

Helene was born in Sweden, educated at the University of Lund and is currently living in Silicon Valley.

Christian Olsson

Information Officer

Christian, who holds the position Vice-President Marketing & Alliances at MySafeLogin Inc., has extensive marketing, alliances and sales management experience from the Silicon Valley startup scene including MySafeLogin continuous autentication software, ByteShield digital rights management software, Marratech (Google) videoconferencing, Protegrity database security, and TenFour (FoxT) email security. Christian has also served as the Swedish Trade Commissioner to Australia where he assisted Swedish hitech companies while entering the Australian market. His career started with 14 years at ITT Flygt, the world's leading submersible pump manufacturer, where he held sales & marketing management positions in the US, Sweden and Australia. 

Annika Steiber

Chair, SIG Mobile

Annika Steiber has experience in areas such as Mobile, Professional Services, Innovation/ Entrepreneurship, and Sales & Marketing. She has an extensive industrial background and has worked in leading positions for Swedish and American companies in Business Development, Sales and Marketing for 16 years. In addition, she has started her own start-up in the area of wireless broadband. She is currently living in Silicon Valley where she has specialized on innovation in major firms by researching on the topic and by working as an advisor within the area. Mrs. Steiber has a M.Sc. and soon a Ph.D. from Chalmers University of Technology and her key interest is to foster relations between the Nordics and Silicon Valley. 

Lars Jensen

Chair, SIG Cloud & Social Media

Lars is a partner at Scale Capital, a venture fund investing in Danish tech startups. He is passionate about entrepreneurship and has founded several companies in Denmark. Lars currently serves as an advisor and Angel Investor to a number of cloud based startups.

A major motivation for joining Silicon Valley Vikings is to help build a bridge between the innovation laps and tech startups in Denmark and funding opportunities in the Valley. Lars is a tireless advocate of knowledge sharing across the Atlantic, and leverages applied learning’s from other parts of the world. 

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Lars worked in leadership positions within large organizations such as Cable & Wireless, TDC and Saxo Bank. He was also a management consultant at a London based consulting firm.

Lars holds a BA in Marketing, a graduate degree in Foreign Trade from Copenhagen Business School, and an MBA (hons) from Babson College in Boston, MA.