Rod Beckstrom is a serial start-up entrepreneur and co-author of The Starfish and the Spider: the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Rod has the gift of being able to design innovative organizations to support a product or idea. When he was still a student at Stanford Business School, he published the first universal mathematical model for pricing interest rate and currency swaps. At the same time he co-founded CATS Software, Inc., a risk management software company, out of his apartment with $20,000. Rod was forced to become an astute student of organizations when as Chairman and CEO he quickly grew CATS from a product idea into a worldwide company listed on the NASDAQ.　 He then sold the company for more than $100 million in cash and earn-outs.

He has continued to be on the cutting edge of organizational structures through his work with Silicon Valley companies as an angel investor and limited partner in leading venture capital funds.　

Rod has advised government officials around the world. He has also given speeches on organizational structure, technology and leadership at the State of the World Forum, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Microsoft, Starbucks, Napster, Harvard University, Stanford University and YPO Universities.　

At the urging of Nobel Laureate Dr. William F. Sharpe, Rod co-authored the first book on the risk management theory of Value at Risk, An Introduction to VAR, which is now the fundamental framework for international banking capital reserve requirements. He was the founding investor in Mergent Systems, a unique database design company which sold for $200m seven months after founding.　 Rod invested in eBay through a venture capital partnership and realized a 90,000% return on investment.　

Rod is passionate about clean technology and environmental markets and serves on the board of Environmental Defense.