Team

General Partners

David L. Durgin
Dr. H. Raymond Radosevich
Thomas J. Stephenson

Partners

William F. Bice
James R. Higdon
Ron J. McPhee

Entrepreneur-IN-RESIDENCE

Paul Short

David L. Durgin Mr. Durgin is a founding general partner of Verge and also serves as a Partner in Phoenix-based Valley Ventures third venture capital fund. He was a founder and president of Quatro Corporation, New Mexico's first technology commercialization company and he founded Quatro Ventures LLC which is an “angel” investment company he spun out of Quatro in 1995.

Durgin has helped start up, finance and manage more than 20 New Mexico high tech companies of which several have been sold or taken public. He has held virtually every executive position in these companies including Chairman of the Board, Director, CEO / President, CFO and Vice President. Also during the last 10 years, Mr. Durgin evaluated more than 500 business opportunities in New Mexico and provided literally hundreds of hours of pro bono assistance to entrepreneurs, start-up companies, and state and local economic development initiatives. He has served as a member of the New Mexico Governor's Technical Excellence Committee, been a Founder, Officer and Director of Next Generation Economy Corporation and has served as an Advisor and Sponsor of the Technology Ventures Corporation's New Mexico Equity Capital Symposium.

Durgin has 45 years experience as an electrical engineer, technical project manager, technical business developer, business executive, entrepreneur and investor. He designed, developed and manufactured advanced electronic systems for nuclear and conventional weapons at Sandia National Laboratories and was nationally recognized as an expert on mitigating the effects of nuclear environments on aircraft and missile systems. During the Cold War, he successfully built large, profitable system analysis, design and development businesses at BDM International and Booz Allen & Hamilton. At BDM, he was a Vice President responsible for managing over 200 people and numerous multi-million dollar projects. Durgin was hired as a Partner at Booz Allen & Hamilton, where he started and grew the Defense and Energy Technology Division of which he became the Managing Senior Partner. He is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of New Mexico State University with a B.S.E.E. degree. He was selected as a Centennial Outstanding Alumnus by New Mexico State University (NMSU) and is an Outstanding Alumnus of the NMSU College of Engineering.

Dr. H. Raymond Radosevich Dr. Radosevich, also a founding partner of Verge, has four degrees including a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, M.S. in Industrial Engineering, M.S. in Industrial Administration and a Ph.D. For 30 years he was a professor, associate dean and dean in the field of management. In 1980, he was the Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to establish the University of New Mexico Technological Innovation Center, an organizational experiment to commercialize technology from the national laboratories and universities in New Mexico. Dr. Radosevich established and became President and Chairman of the Board of the New Mexico Technological Innovation Program, Inc. (NMTIP), a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation that provided business start-up assistance to spin-off companies in exchange for equity. The companies assisted by NMTIP raised more than $33 million in seed capital over a five-year period. Dr. Radosevich was involved in many of the infusions, frequently serving on the Boards of Directors.

From 1985 to 1988, Dr. Radosevich served as the Dean of the Robert O. Anderson Schools of Management at UNM. He was a Director of VAWTPower, Inc., a publicly-held corporation in New Mexico that manufactured vertical axis wind turbines under a technology transfer agreement from Sandia National Laboratories. He was also a Director of Pulse Systems, Inc., and Quasar International, Inc., spin-offs from Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Director of General Energy Technologies, Inc., which was founded by a scientist from the Department of Defense's Phillips Laboratory. He founded the New Mexico Entrepreneurs Association and in collaboration with the city of Albuquerque, planned and assisted in the launching of the city's first incubator, the New Mexico Business Innovation Center for which he served as the Chairman of the Board. He is currently a Director of Wellkeeper, Inc. and Avasca Medical, Inc., and represents Verge as an observer on the board of Intellicyt, Inc.

While on sabbatical during the 1990 academic year, he served on the Department of Energy (DOE) Technology Transfer Field Task Force and was responsible for providing first-draft versions of a number of key issue papers from which DOE's technology transfer policies have evolved. He was a consultant to DOE for nine years. He has also been a consultant to dozens of major corporations around the world.  Dr. Radosevich is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 10 books and monographs (including From Lab to Market: the Commercialization of Public Sector Technology  with Suleiman Kassicieh in 1994). He is currently a Special Limited Partner of Valley Ventures II and III in their New Mexico office.

Thomas J. Stephenson Prior to co-founding Verge Fund in the Spring of 2003, Mr. Stephenson had been a General Partner of various funds of Murphree Venture Partners. He joined Murphree Venture Partners in 1997 to open their New Mexico office after serving as the Director of Education and Research for the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI), a world-recognized leader in fostering the development of high-technology start-up companies. At ATI, he prepared entrepreneurs for raising angel and venture capital, evaluated businesses for entry into the incubator and provided business consulting to ATI companies. Stephenson served as an invited speaker to the National Business Incubation Association's National Conference, and assisted the Russian Academy of Market Management's Morozov Project in the formation of six pilot incubators in that country by providing on-site advice, generating local government support, and authoring their "Incubator Operations Manual."

Prior to receiving his M.B.A. in Information Management and Technology Transfer from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, Stephenson was a member of the science department faculty at his prep school alma mater, the Albuquerque Academy, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While completing his B.A. in Physics at Rice University, he worked as a technical aide at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Stephenson represents Verge Fund on the Board of Directors of Altaview, Quadric, and Wellkeeper and as a Board Observer of Altela and Nanocrystal. He also serves on several non-profit Boards of Directors, including the New Mexico Information Technology and Software Association; the New Mexico Venture Capital Association; the Coronado Ventures Forum; and the Association for Commerce and Industry. Tom is on the Community Advisory Board of First Community Bank. He is also a founding member and past chairman of the Advisory Board for the McCombs M.B.A. Alumni Network at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a graduate of the 2000 class of Leadership New Mexico.

William F. Bice One of New Mexico’s most successful technology entrepreneurs, Mr. Bice founded ProLaw Software shortly after graduating high school. ProLaw developed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for law firms, corporate legal departments and government agencies, integrating previously disparate business functions into one seamless management system. Serving as CEO, Mr. Bice grew ProLaw organically into a 160 person leader in legal technology. The company was acquired by Thomson West, the pre-eminent provider of information resources to the legal industry. Mr. Bice joined the executive committee of Thomson West, continuing to run the ProLaw operations and working on the executive team for the purchase of Elite Information Group, a former competitor to ProLaw Software. In addition, Mr. Bice developed the new West km business unit in recognition of which he received the Thomson Legal & Regulatory President's Award.

Mr. Bice then returned to the startup world, founding BoomTime, an ecommerce platform for local, independent service businesses. Through it's SpaBoom brand, BoomTime has captured over 10% of the spa market in less than two years since it's marketing launch.

James R. Higdon Mr. Higdon has 30 years of direct operating experience in a variety of technology businesses, including smaller firms and publicly traded companies. After spending 14 years with Texas Instruments, he moved to Northern California where he served as Chief Financial Officer for Micro Power Systems, a private semiconductor company, and Diasonics, an NYSE-listed medical electronics company. In 1992, Mr. Higdon assumed leadership of CVI Laser in Albuquerque, growing that company’s EBITDA fourteen-fold over the 11 years he served as their senior operating and executive officer. In 2003, Mr. Higdon negotiated the sale of CVI Laser, producing an annualized rate of return in excess of 20% to the shareholders.

Ron J. McPhee After studying computer engineering at the University of New Mexico, Mr. McPhee founded HealthFirst Corporation in 1990.  HealthFirst rapidly became the nation’s leading provider of health management software solutions to fortune 500 companies, local and federal governments and health care organizations.  The company was acquired in 2000 by Finish based Polar Electro – a world leader in cardiovascular monitoring technology.  After the acquisition, McPhee remained the CEO of HealthFirst and became a senior member of the Polar management team ultimately responsible for all sales under the Polar brand in North America. 

Building on his health management experience, McPhee founded Nuvita in 2006.  Nuvita is a technology services company focused on reducing health care related costs by reducing the claims associated with lifestyle related disease.    In addition, McPhee is the Chairman of the Board of AltaView Technologies.

Paul Short Mr. Short holds BS and MS Electrical Engineering degrees from New Mexico State University, and held positions as an engineer with NMSU’s Physical Science Laboratory then as a principal engineer with Honeywell. He went on to found InnovASIC, a design services company that developed integrated circuits for other companies. He then successfully evolved the InnovASIC business model from a services firm to a semiconductor product company that designs, manufactures (through outsource), and sells integrated circuits, growing the company to over $5 million in revenue during a period of industry contraction.