Alexander Mintz, CEO

Alexander Mintz is co-founder and CEO of Zircon Computing LLC. Prior to his engagement with Zircon Computing Alexander co-founded TAF Co, a software development and services firm specializing in high-performance computing solutions for the financial services industry and worked in various roles from software engineering to IT executive at Bear Stearns, KBC FP, and Morgan Stanley among others. Alexander has over 20 years of experience in financial industry in the areas of electronic trading and high performance distributed architectures.

Andrew Kaplan, President

Andrew Kaplan is co-founder and President of Zircon Computing LLC. Prior to his engagement with Zircon Computing Andrew co-founded TAF Co, a software development and services firm specializing in high performance computing solutions for the financial services industry. Prior to founding TAF Co., Andrew served as a Senior VP in KBC Financial Products, which he joined from Bear Stearns. Prior to Bear Stearns, he co-founded and served as CTO of Hekker, Ltd. an advanced technology company focused on consumer response systems. At Hekker, he led extensive product deployment projects for customers such as Norelco, American Standard and Molson.

Dr. Grigory Vilkov, Managing Partner

Grigory Vilkov co-founded Zircon Computing and joined it as Managing Partner to lead Zircon's International division. He provides strategic direction as well as day to day operations and technical leadership at Zircon.

Grigory began his career in derivatives trading and risk management more than 10 years ago. Since then he has been active in various sales and trading roles, successfully managed a private fund trading derivatives in emerging markets and carried out several information technology assignments in the fields of advanced communications, parallel processing and high performance computing.

Since 2002 Grigory has combined his study towards a PhD degree in Finance with a number of venture-backed projects, including development of an Asset-Backed Securities Platform by the firm Securitisation Consulting GmbH, and development of a high performance correlation trading strategy for an algorithmic hedge fund.

Grigory Vilkov received his PhD at INSEAD and his MBA at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration. His academic focus and research interests are in the area of empirical asset pricing, use of derivatives in corporate finance and risk management. He is currently an assistant professor at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and visiting lecturer in the ESMT Full-time MBA program.

Jim Fischer, VP of Sales

Jim Fischer comes to Zircon Computing with a diverse background in launching emerging technology startups into the Fortune 1000 and public sector markets. A graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago, Jim spent his early career in accounting prior to becoming the IT lead at Proctor and Gamble's Baltimore manufacturing facility.

Jim joined Compuware Corp in 1981, first in their services organization and then moving to their nascent software division where he was a three time salesperson of the year, western regional manager and launched their Federal sales initiative.

In 1995 Jim joined Memco Software, an Israeli based pioneer in the Identity and Access Management and directly generated over 14 million in revenue through accounts such as GTE and Citigroup, PTO while launching and managing their Federal sales team.

Since Memco's sale to CA in 1999, Jim has helped a diverse group of emerging technology startups in developing and executing go to market strategies as a consultant and in business development and senior sales management capacities.