Mr. Seawell is a Venture Partner at Dakota Capital and brings more than 30 years of high technology experience to the Dakota team. He has taken 3 companies public as a CFO and has sold another to Sun Microsystems. In addition to his work with Dakota Capital, Mr. Seawell is also a Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), focusing on software and semiconductor companies. From 2000-2004, Mr. Seawell was a Venture Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV).

Prior to TCV, Mr. Seawell spent 25 years serving in financial and operational positions at several high-tech companies. From 1997-1998, Mr. Seawell was executive vice president of NetDynamics, an application server software company, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems. From 1991 to 1997, Mr. Seawell was senior vice president - finance and operations and CFO of Synopsys, an electronic design automation software company. During his tenure at Synopsys, revenue grew from $20 million to $500 million. Mr. Seawell engineered the company's IPO in 1992.

In 1990, Upside magazine recognized Mr. Seawell as one of its top 15 high-tech CFOs. Previously, Mr. Seawell was vice president - finance and production and CFO at Weitek, a semiconductor company, which he took public in 1988. In 1979, he co-founded and was CFO of Southwall Technologies, which went public in 1987.

Mr. Seawell holds a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. He is currently on the Board of Directors of Informatica Corporation, NVIDIA Corporation and several privately held companies.