Bios
Ken Kantor
Founder and President
With over a dozen industry Design and Engineering awards, plus four "Grand Prix" product honors, it is understandable that a national magazine recently called Ken Kantor, "A genuine audio legend." Ken's leadership contribution to audio, technology and brand development over the last three decades is universally admired in the business, and by knowledgeable consumers. In addition to fielding a string of hit products that anticipated important consumer trends, Ken co-founded companies including Intelligent Audio Systems, Vergence Technology, NHT and Tymphany,. He has also served as the senior technical executive at International Jensen, Altec-Lansing and Teledyne Acoustic Research (AR), among others.
Among the first scientists to emerge from MIT's Media Technology program in 1981, Ken Kantor has enjoyed a successful and celebrated career as a product designer and entrepreneur. Widely published, Ken holds patents in acoustics, DSP and audio electronics, and has been elected to Administrative Committees of the IEEE and the Audio Engineering Society. His clients and customers have included Hewlett-Packard, NBC, Ford, Fender, Bose, ATT, Sony, LG, Microsoft and many others. He has been thrice profiled in the NY Times, been a guest on radio and TV, and has appeared in dozens of interviews and articles, from Forbes to Rolling Stone to Stereophile. He is the subject of an sizable entry in the reference Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound. Because of his hard-core advanced engineering background, together with his knowledge of consumers, distribution and markets, a leading audio publication once called Kantor, "…one of the smartest designers ever to work in the field of audio."
ZT Amplifiers, Inc, brings together all the facets of Ken's career, from his important technical work miniaturizing amplifiers and acoustical products, to his life long fascination with sound quality and commitment to the advancement of music technology, finally to his keen sense of marketplace trends and gut product appeal. Ken views ZT as the perfect vehicle to continue to deliver groundbreaking, highly successful products.
Steven Colman
CEO
Over the past 30 years, Mr. Colman has been involved in starting a series of successful software companies. Most recently, Mr. Colman was CEO and Chairman of Mendocino Software the premiere provider of continuous data backup licensed by HP and EMC. Prior to Mendocino, Mr. Colman consulted with a variety of VC firms such as, Warburg Pincus, RedPoint, Greylock, Mayfield, etc. after leaving his operation role at VERITAS.
Mr. Colman was the Vice President of Worldwide OEM Sales & Strategic Alliances at VERITAS where he managed relationships with all of the major server, storage, networking and application companies. Mr. Colman grew VERITAS' OEM operation to a $250M+ software business and developed major new relationships with IBM, Oracle, Sun, Dell, Compaq, NEC, Hitachi and EMC, among others.
Prior to VERITAS, Mr. Colman was part of the original team at OpenVision and held several key management roles in marketing, direct and indirect sales. Mr. Colman helped OpenVision build the product line and distribution strategy that took the flagship product, NetBackup, to the #1 market share position. Mr. Colman was also a founder of Comware Inc., Clearspring Technologies and Software Clearing House, all of which were successfully acquired by larger software firms.