Meet the Team Advisors

Fred Weber is well known for his ten years of leadership at AMD, where he served as Chief Technical Officer and Corporate Vice President, as well as Vice President of Design. He led AMD to greater prominence in the industry, and was named one of the 25 most influential CTOs by InfoWorld Magazine. Two years into his tenure as CTO, AMD unveiled the industry’s first x86-compatible 64-bit processors, the Opteron and Athlon 64. Fred led the design of AMD’s first 64-bit processor.

Weber currently serves on the board and as an advisor for Lattice Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics, Netspeed Systems, and others. He co-founded MetaRAM, Inc. and was a member of the founding team of Kendall Square Research, an early leader in the development of memory systems, CPU, and multiprocessor verification. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, studied Physics and Systems Engineering at Harvard University, and received BS in Physics.

Dr. Lauk is a prominent business leader who successfully led five companies and is currently President at Globe CP GmbH and Globe Capital Partners LLC. He is on the boards of Magna International Inc. and Fortemedia Inc.

Dr. Lauk was previously Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, deputy CEO and CFO of Audi AG, CFO at VEBA AG (today E.ON SE), and Member of the Board of Management of Truck Division at DaimlerChrysler. He also serves as a Trustee of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and is an honorary professor at the European Business School in Reichartshausen, Germany.

Dr. Lauk earned a graduate degree from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, an MBA from Stanford, and a doctorate in international politics from the University of Kiel.

He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2009 where he was on the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, and the Foreign and Security Affairs Committee. He was President of the Economic Council to the Christian Democratic Party from 2000-2015, and at this capacity he advised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for 15 years.

Steve Furber is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He received his B.A. degree in Mathematics in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Aerodynamics in 1980 from the University of Cambridge, England. From 1981 to 1990 he worked in the hardware development group within the R&D department at Acorn Computers Ltd, and was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, both of which earned Acorn Computers a Queen’s Award for Technology.

Upon moving to the University of Manchester in 1990 he established the Amulet research group which has interests in asynchronous logic design and power-efficient computing, and which merged with the Parallel Architectures and Languages group in 2000 to form the Advanced Processor Technologies group. From 2003 to 2008 the APT group was supported by an EPSRC Portfolio Partnership Award.

Steve was one of the 2022 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering award winners.

Mario is Head of Advisory at IPM Group and one of the founding initiators of the IPM Growth strategy. He provides companies and private clients with the opportunity to utilize a full range of advisory, investment, and capital-raising services. Mario joined IPM after an eighteen-year career in public sector finance institutions, bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience from that unique perspective to IPM’s activities.

Prior to IPM, Mario served as a Board Representative for Slovakia at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (“EBRD”) in London, one of the most recognized global financiers for transition economies. His main responsibilities included maintaining good international relations and promoting the bank’s development agenda, as well as advising on EU policy formulation and responses to geopolitical challenges. Before his time at the EBRD, Mario was the Director General for the International Relations Department of the Ministry of Finance of Slovakia, after having previously held numerous other national and supranational positions within the ministry. Mario also served as Acting Director General of the European Funds Department. Mario worked closely on projects with the European Commission, the World Bank Group, EBRD, CEB, OECD, UNDP, USAID, ABA CEELI and many other multilateral organizations.

Mario holds a Master’s degree in Business Economics from the University of Economics in Bratislava.