Marcel Dridje

Marcel Dridje is currently the Sophia Business Angels President (Nice, France), an EBAN Board Member, and Mentor at The Camp (Aix en Provence, France ). A seasoned European sales senior executive, Marcel has substantial field experience helping IT and telecom startups in the U.S. and EMEA. Marcel has a broad range of experience in all aspects of sales, marketing, communication and management with direct experience with Fortune 500 enterprises (IBM, Nortel, Lucent, Cisco, EMC, ALU) and startups (Quantum, Andrew Networks, Pluris, Corvis, Ascend and Airespace). During the course of his career, he has held VP roles, most notably as VP EMEA Corvis (first all-optical router), where he grew the team and business to an outstanding success. Of French-Algerian and British origin, Marcel launched his career after completing a BSc in Electronics and Computer Science from Portsmouth Polytechnic UK and holds an M&A executive program credential from INSEAD. Marcel recently left CISCO after 30 years in IT and telecom sales to start his new venture as a business angel with SBA to help startups with seed money, VC connections and business development. Vaelsys/ IVAS, Microgine, Faveeo, Digitalarti, OnePulse and Cyberflowanalytics (Webroot) are six of his star ventures. A self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, Marcel loves new challenges in sharing his 30 years of experience in IT and telecom and high-tech VC firms with new high-tech start-ups ready to expand their sales and marketing success across EMEA, the USA and APAC.