N2Growth Places Mark Iwanowski as CEO of Venture-Backed Formulus Black

PHILADELPHIA, July 30, 2019 — N2Growth Inc., a global leader in human and organizational performance and top executive search firm, recently placed Mark Iwanowski as CEO of Formulus Black. The search was led by Blake Lindgren, senior director at N2Growth.

Mike Myatt, Chairman of N2Growth said, “Our private equity and venture capital practice has experienced rapid growth due to our ability to understand the needs of sophisticated investors and to pair them with exceptional C-level leadership talent.”

The venture-backed startup Formulus Black develops Forsa, a technology that is unlocking the power of in-memory computing for all applications, delivering a level of performance unmatchable by any SSD or other I/O-bound technology. The company’s software enables memory to be easily and efficiently used as a high-performance storage media. Forsa can be used to power the most demanding application workloads and for developers seeking to minimize latency, maximize throughput and scale without performance loss.

Prior to his appointment as Formulus Black CEO, Mr. Iwanowski was CEO and President of Global Visions-SV, Inc., a global consulting group focused on venture, M&A, and other early-stage companies. At Global Visions, he supervised the selection, mentoring and seed funding of 20 promising startups in the Republic of Georgia. Prior to that, he was Managing Director of Trident Capital, a top tier VC with an average IRR exceeding 30 percent. Iwanowski spent four years at Oracle Corporation as SVP, Global IT and CIO to guide Oracle into the Software as a Service (SaaS) business and was involved in the acquisition and integration of approximately $30 billion of complementary technology companies. For five years prior, he was COO of Science Applications International Corp.’s Telecom and IT outsourcing consultancy. He has also held executive positions with Raytheon, Honeywell, Applied Remote Technology (sold to Raytheon), Quantum Magnetics (sold to Invison then GE), and Neohapsis (acquired by Cisco). He serves on the advisory board for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which recently made its first successful commercial flight into space. Early in his career, Iwanowski played professional football for the New York Jets, Oakland Raiders, and Kansas City Chiefs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in engineering from California Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from National University.

“Mark is exactly the type of leader Formulus Black was looking for. He has deep experience as a startup executive, a highly successful track record as a venture capitalist, and the leadership traits that will propel Formulus Black into the next phase of its success,” said Lindgren. Tony Morales, managing director at N2Growth added, “This was a particularly gratifying search for a company that is unlocking the opportunity and power of in-memory computing. We made the placement quickly and with a fantastic candidate. Blake and his team did a tremendous job in understanding Formulus Black’s needs and rapidly identifying a great candidate in Mark.”