Alexander Wiedmer

Alexander Wiedmer has been responsible for investments in the IT industry. He is currently on the boards of directors of Datamars, Omniperception, Babel Technologies, Kiala SA, Kotio SA, Neocase and WStore Europe.

Prior to joining the Team, Alexander Wiedmer was international marketing director for multimedia rights at Universal Content (Toronto), a licensing agency for multimedia content. He had previously created a consulting company in the field of communications marketing and event management in Canada.

Alexander Wiedmer studied at Upper Canada College (Toronto), McGill University (Montreal) and the University of Western Ontario (Hons. BA Phil.) and holds an MBA in Technology Management from Theseus International Management Institute (Sophia-Antipolis, France).

He has held various pro bono positions on boards and committees of educational organisations. He has Swiss and Canadian citizenships.

Claude Rameau

Claude Rameau is the President of France Angels.

Having started his career as a consultant in the management of innovation, he joined later the INSEAD (Fontainebleau). He has been successively: Professor in the fields of Managerial Economics and Decision Making; Associate Dean for Executive Education (1972-1981); Dean of INSEAD (1981-1993). He is, since 1995, Vice-Chairman of the Board of INSEAD.

For four years (1994-1997) he became Vice-President of EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) in Brussels.

Since 1994, he became a “Business Angel” and invested (in seed capital) in innovative new businesses in France, UK, USA and Czech Republic. He was in 2001 the founding member of France Angels, the French Federation of Business Angels Networks: he became co-president and then President of France Angels, and in 2004 EBAN’s Vice President.

He is a member of the board of several companies and academic Institutions in Europe and Asia. Since 1989, he is an elected member of the town Council and then Deputy Mayor, in MELUN, a medium size town south Paris. Mr. Rameau has a background in Telecommunications and an MBA from INSEAD.

Michael Krafft

Michael Krafft is the owner of Star Clippers. He got his first job when he was 6 years old carrying varnish in a shipyard near his home in Sweden. Later he became a maritime lawyer in Sweden and France, and much later founded the White Star Group in Belgium. This company commissioned the design and construction of the first two sailing ships of the Star Clippers branch, the four-masted square-rigged 170 passenger barquentines Star Flyer and Star Clipper, in the early nineties. But Kraft had even more ambitious plans and ten years later commissioned the five-masted square-rigged Royal Clipper.

Everything on board is designed so that all passengers can feel the power of the sails as they capture the energy of the wind. Standing on the top deck, the wind blowing nice and steady, all square sails unfurled, is an unforgettable experience. The Royal Clipper usually sails totally under sail power, without engines, as opposed to other "sail" cruises that are almost always under engine power along with sails.

The Royal Clipper is the flagship of Star Clippers and, as well as her two former fleet mates, is built to high safety construction and rigging standards. The steel hull vessel carries the highest rating possible +100 A1. She is registered in Luxembourg.

Philip Green

He made his first million by cleverly buying, turning around and finally selling a failing retailer called "Jean Jeanie". Buying the company for £65,000 plus debt, which he negotiated a goodwill gesture of £100,000 with the main lending bank to freeze repayments with as he tried to turn the business around, he ended up selling for £9 million of which he paid off its debt and walked away with £6 million. These early examples of entrepreneurship and clothes retailing expertise were to foreshadow his later bigger successes.

In the early 1990s Green bought the department store chain Owen Owen which at the time had about 12 branches trading under the Owen Owen and Lewis's brand names. During his ownership most of these department stores were sold to other operators including Debenhams and Allders or were closed leaving only the Liverpool branch trading as Lewis's remaining. In 2004 this remaining store was sold off to David Thompson.

In 1995 he linked with Tom Hunter to buy sports retailler OLYMPUS, as part of a merger. The price was one British pound, plus the assumption of £30 million in debt. Green and his partners sold the company three years later to JJB Sports for £550 million. Green walked away £73 million richer. That encouraged the Barclay brothers to back him in the £538m acquisition of the Sears retail chain (a different Sears from Sears, Roebuck and Company) in 1999. The subsequent disposal programme (including selling some of the assets, ironically, to Arcadia) raised £729m and confirmed his reputation as a man who could deliver within the retail sector.

Green came to public attention in 1999 when he attempted to make a £7 billion hostile bid for Marks and Spencer. However the leaking of the bid forced up M&S's share price. The board of M&S were also hostile to the bid and sought to block it. Eventually Green gave up and purchased the ailing retail chain BHS for £200 million. His takeover came when everyone else had dismissed the company as a failing brand and unfixable. Green put up £50 million of his own money and borrowed another £150 million to seal the deal. Green completely turned the company around, rebranded it as BHS, and the chain is now thought to be worth over £1.2 billion. Since he took over, profits have tripled to over £200 million a year.

Next, Green purchased the Arcadia Group, which owns well-known High Street chains such as Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Outfit, Topshop/Topman and Wallis in 2002. Recently he has added the Etam chain to the group. Green paid £850m, and repaid the £808m he borrowed to finance the deal in two years, a move that stunned commentators when it was announced. The Arcadia Group has been enormously profitable, and currently has pre-tax profits of around £380 million. On 20 October 2005 Green awarded Arcadia shareholders a £1.3 billion dividend. He and his wife are joint owners of 92% of the group, and therefore received £1.17bn - the largest payout to an individual in British corporate history.

Walter de Brouwer

Walter De Brouwer was nicknamed by Corriere della Sera the "Woody Allen del business" because of his übernerd personality. He is most known as the founder of the European cult company Starlab, the first private blue sky research laboratory (called 'Nerd Heaven') that once, together with Paul Allen's Interval and MIT specialized in highly advanced 'deep future' research. This gained him the reputation as a futurist and big-picture thinker. De Brouwer was asked for the 20th Anniversary of The Wall Street Journal Europe as one of the four guru's to depict the World in 2023 together with John Naisbitt (Global Paradox), Bill Ghitis (Dupont) and Shai Agassi (SAP).

De Brouwer studied Philology at the University of Ghent and did his PhD in Semiotics at the University of Tilburg (Holland). He started his academic career as an assistant lecturer at the Jesuit University UFSIA (Antwerp) but left academia in 1989 and became an entrepreneur. In 17 years' time he set up more than 40 companies, was involved in several international IPO's (Stepstone [LSE: sso], Eunet-Qwest [nyse:Q]) and stood at the cradle of long-distance carriers in two continents (Eunet, Qwest). Originally De Brouwer's expertise was in publishing; he founded an international publishing house that published three computer magazines in three countries and was taken over by VNU in 1995.

In 2008 Walter De Brouwer was elected Chairman of the (British) Royal Society of Arts (RSA, Europe) serves since 2003 as a Director of the Tau Zero Foundation, which was formerly known as NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project.