2018

Toby Russell is Co-CEO of Shift, the platform to make buying and selling cars fun, fair, and accessible to everyone. Previously, he was Managing Vice President of Digital at Capital One, where he led the bank’s technology transformation, including building the mobile capabilities that are now driving the majority of Capital One’s new customers. In 2007 Toby co-founded Taxi Magic, the first on-demand mobile transportation booking technology. He’s also led a $12 billion renewable energy and efficiency investment program for the US Department of Energy and has been a Project Leader at the Boston Consulting Group. He has a Doctorate from Oxford University.

Ethan joined Venrock in 2017. Based in the Palo Alto office, he focuses on early stage full stack, software-defined systems in robotics, aviation, space, autonomy, intelligent agents, and farming. Ethan joins us after 15 years as a product/design executive, entrepreneur, and angel investor.

Prior to Venrock, Ethan was a Partner at ProFounder, a pre-seed angel syndicate focused on deep technology breakthroughs, and was a Product Leader at Facebook, leading a $15B revenue business. Prior to Facebook, Ethanwas the VP Products and Design at Box, leading new products and growth through their IPO and $400M ARR. Prior to that he was the VP Product & Design at Adchemy and led their acquisition by @WalmartLabs, was the founding product & design leader at RiseSmart (acquired by Randstad), and Headcase labs (acquired). He spent time earlier in his career leading Products & Experience at Yahoo! Search, and Consumer Products at Symantec. Ethan has 16 patents issued or pending across semantic search, predictive systems, and intelligent systems.

Ethan spends time outside the office with his kids building new science experiments and seeking out adrenaline rushing sports. He is an ex-competitive Muy Thai boxer and aspiring fixed-wing pilot.

Varun is based in San Francisco and leads Qualcomm Ventures’ global Early-Stage Fund, focused on Seed and Series A opportunities. This fund has scaled to 75+ investments, which includes winners such as Cruise Automation (acquired by GM), 99 (acquired by Didi) and Zoom. He also serves as the global lead for the fund’s investments in the automotive sector.

He is searching for companies that are using disruptive combinations of software, sensors and connectivity to solve our everyday problems and bear the promise of turning into Fortune 100 scale businesses in coming decades. With that intent he has sourced and led our investments in Clearmotion, Cruise Automation, Even Responsible Finance, Flirtey and Spyce.

In 2017, and again in 2018, Varun was recognized as one among the global top 20 Rising Stars in the corporate venture industry by Global Corporate Venturing.

Before becoming an investor, Varun was a early employee and successful product marketing and business development executive at Mint, which started in 2007 in partnership with The Wall Street Journal and is today one of the largest and most respected business news organizations in Asia. He holds an MBA (Finance) from the Kellogg School of Management where he was a McCormick Scholar; a Masters (Advertising) from Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad; and a Bachelor of Technology (CS, EE) from DA-IICT.

Outside the Office:
Varun is a recovering news-junkie and claims he can cook better Indian food than most restaurants in the Bay Area.

Rob Fan is the co-founder and CTO of Sharethrough, the leading international native advertising software platform. In this role, Fan is responsible for developing the overall technology vision for the company, driving engineering initiatives and collaboration, and overseeing Sharethrough’s product efforts.

Rob is a contributor to industry publications such as TechCrunch and PC Mag and was recently named one of Inc. Magazine’s 35 Coolest Founders.  As an early adopter of Lean Startup, Rob not only applies these principals to Sharethrough but also advises other companies and speaks about Lean Startup in practice.

Prior to Sharethrough, Rob worked for Booz Allen Hamilton providing technical analysis for various three letter agencies and earned degrees from both Stanford and Johns Hopkins.

Jyoti Bansal is a serial entrepreneur and a Silicon Valley technology visionary who believes passionately in software’s ability to change the world for the better. He conceived BIG Labs as a vehicle for “parallel entrepreneurship,” where he can co-create companies that can help define the future of software and technology.

In 2008, he founded AppDynamics, an application intelligence company that provides enterprises with real-time insights into application performance. Jyoti led the company as Founder & CEO for the first eight years, and as Founder & Chairman for the last one year until its acquisition by Cisco for $3.7 Billion in January 2017.

Jyoti has been a recipient of many leadership awards, including Forbes’ “Best Cloud Computing CEO to Work For”, and “Best CEO” by San Francisco Business Times at the Annual Tech & Innovation Award. He was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year™ for Northern California in 2016.

Jyoti received his BS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Prior to founding AppDynamics, Jyoti worked at various silicon valley startups as a software engineer and architect. Jyoti is the lead inventor on 20+ US patents.

Ali Vahabzadeh started his career in investment banking, ultimately serving as a Vi­ce President of Equity Derivatives for Banc of America Securities in New York and London over nine years. He moved to San Francisco in 2010 to head up a real estate tech startup that was the first to develop an algorithm that ranked and referred real estate agents based on their statistical performance in the marketplace.

In 2014, inspired by successful, informal mass transit he experienced throughout the world, Vahabzadeh founded Chariot (chariot.com) in San Francisco. Chariot is a VC­ and Y Combinator­ funded startup that invites the public and enterprises to crowdsource new commuter routes then launches a twice-­daily service when a critical mass of riders between neighborhoods want a faster and more reliable commute. The company uses 14­-passenger vans and employee drivers to provide its app­based service now used by tens of thousands of commuters daily. In 2016, Chariot sold to Ford Smart Mobility, becoming Ford’s first mobility acquisition and the cornerstone of its mobility strategy, specifically “Microtransit”.

Over the next 18 months, Chariot expanded to six cities including New York and London. Mr. Vahabzadeh stepped down as CEO in February 2018 after successfully pivoting Chariot’s strategy from consumer (B2C) to an enterprise­led go­to­market strategy that now serves companies, hospitals, universities and several cities as its primary customers. He regularly consults the company, remains on Chariot’s Board of Directors and is currently exploring launching a new venture in mobility services.

Mr. Vahabzadeh graduated with honors with a B.A. in Economics from Vanderbilt University and lives full time in San Francisco.

Sumeet Jain is a Founding Partner of 7 Global Capital, a new cross border growth fund focused on helping US category leading tech companies expand commercially in the EU market. Previously he was a co-founder and General Partner with LUMA Capital partners. Prior to that he was with Intel Capital in its Digital Media group, a partner at CMEA Capital and a technology investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He also was with two startup companies, Personify and iManage.

Steffen Bartschat is a member of Sand Hill Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the world.  During his day job as CEO of Hill88, Steffen helps large corporates engage with the Silicon Valley ecosystem.   He has held senior management positions ranging from early stage startups (Lumo BodyTech) to Fortune 50 corporations (IBM) in the consumer, automotive, and enterprise software sectors. Steffen holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University and an M.S. in Business Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Soma is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group.  Pior to joining Madrona, Soma had a successful twenty-seven-year career at Microsoft Corporation. His last role at Microsoft was Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division. Soma has long been an angel investor, with more than 50 such investments across a wide range of technology areas. At Madrona, he is focusing on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Applications and Developer centric platforms and tools.  Soma serves on the boards of MightyAI, SmartAssist.io, Pixvana, Shyft, Icebrg, and CloudCoreo.  Madrona Venture Group has deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.  Apple acquired two of Madrona’s AI portfolio companies: Turi and Lattice. Additionally, Kitt.ai was acquired by Baidu.

Dr. Shubhra Jain is an investor at Cota Capital where she is responsible for sourcing, executing and analyzing healthcare investments. Cota Capital is a stage agnostic fund in San Francisco investing in Healthcare, Tech and Fintech. Prior to Cota, Shubhra was Associate Director of Commercial Strategy and Corporate Development at Natera where she focused on biopharma partnerships, acquisitions, market research and competitive positioning. Prior to Natera, she led Product management for Acute care suite of products at Pieces Technologies where she led product development and launch of SaaS risk surveillance and prediction solutions for clinical outcomes and published peer-reviewed research on the subject. Dr. Jain has served as a consultant and an advisor to several health tech startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Dr. Jain is a Primary Care Physician by background, has her Masters in Engineering from Stanford with a major in Biodesign and her MBA from the Wharton School of Business.