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Board & Advisors

Experts and visionaries who unlock innovation, deliver customer value, and drive growth.

Peter Barris

Peter is Chairman and General Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Peter joined NEA in 1992 and was the firm’s Managing General Partner from 1999-2017. During his 18 years at the helm, NEA’s assets under management grew from $1B to over $20B and the organization scaled its operations to become one of the world’s largest venture capital firms. Under Peter’s leadership, NEA invested in industry-transforming technology companies like CareerBuilder, Tableau, Diapers.com, Groupon, Jet.com, Juniper Networks, Macromedia, Salesforce.com, TiVo, and Workday.

He has been named several times to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors, to Crain’s Chicago 50 Top Tech Stars, to Washington Tech Council’s Hall of Fame, and to the Washington Business Hall of Fame. Peter has personally led investments in over two dozen technology companies that have successfully completed public offerings or mergers. He serves on the board of public company Groupon (GRPN) and is currently a director of several private companies including Catalytic, NextNav, Sprout Social, Tamr, Tempus, ThreatQuotient, Upskill, ViewLift (Snagfilms), and ZeroFox.

Prior to joining NEA, Peter was President and Chief Operating Officer of Legent Corporation (LGNT) and Senior Vice President of the Systems Software Division of UCCEL Corporation (UCE). Both companies were ultimately acquired at valuations that were record-breaking for the time. Earlier, Peter spent almost a decade at General Electric Company in a variety of management positions, including Vice President and General Manager at GE Information Services. He is Vice-Chair of the Northwestern University Board of Trustees and serves on the Board of the Tuck School Private Equity and Entrepreneur Center. Peter previously served on the Executive Committee of the Board of the National Venture Capital Association and was also a founding member of Venture Philanthropy Partners, a philanthropic organization in the Washington D.C. area. Peter received his BSEE from Northwestern University and his MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

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Rich Boyle

Rich is a General Partner at Canaan Partners. Rich is a longtime operations executive turned venture capitalist who invests in real estate tech, artificial intelligence, robotics, and marketplaces. Rich was the President, Chairman and CEO of LoopNet, the leading online marketplace for the Commercial Real Estate industry. He led LoopNet through a successful IPO in 2006 and an eventual $900 million sale to CoStar Group. Earlier, Rich was SVP of Products & Technology at Risk Management Solutions and, immediately prior to joining Canaan, an Operating Partner with Khosla Ventures. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Vinod Khosla

Vinod is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite being from an Indian army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about the founding of Intel, he dreamt of starting his own technology company.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, Vinod failed to start a soymilk company to service the many people in India who did not have refrigerators. Instead, he came to the U.S. to further his academic studies and received a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Eventually, his startup dreams led him to Silicon Valley, where he received a master’s degree in business administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Upon graduation, Vinod co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The company went on to achieve significant revenue, profits and an IPO. Then, driven by the frustration of having to design the computer hardware on which the Daisy software needed to be built, Vinod started the standards-based Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for software developers. As the founding CEO of Sun, he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Sun Microsystems was funded by Vinod’s longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB).

In 1986, Vinod joined KPCB as a general partner. While there, he played a crucial role in taking on Intel’s monopoly by building and growing semiconductor company, Nexgen, which eventually was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Nexgen/AMD was the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel. Thereafter, Vinod helped incubate the idea and business plan for Juniper Networks to take on Cisco System’s dominance of the router market. He also was involved in the formulation of the early advertising-based search strategy for Excite. In addition to his many other contributions at KPCB, he helped transform the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent Corporation, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $7.2 billion.

In 2004, driven by the need for flexibility to accommodate four teenaged children, the desire to be more experimental and to fund sometimes imprudent “science experiments,” Vinod formed Khosla Ventures to focus on both for-profit and social impact investments. His goals remain the same: work and learn from fun and knowledgeable entrepreneurs, build impactful companies by leveraging innovation and spend time with a partnership that makes a difference. Vinod has a passion for nascent technologies that have beneficial effects and economic impact on society. While he only serves on the boards of a few select companies, he works closely with most KV companies as they face transitions or key decisions.

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Nadia Shouraboura, Ph.D.

Nadia is the CEO of Hointer. Hointer is a technology and consulting company that helps retailers build amazing shopping experiences centered on one thing: bringing magic to the in-store experience by merging the best of the physical and digital universe. Dr. Shouraboura was born to excel in math. Her master’s degree work in machine learning attracted the attention of Princeton University where she was offered a scholarship and received a PhD in Mathematics. Her research resulted in several important papers, referenced by over 200 publications.

Nadia joined Amazon.com in March of 2004 and served on Jeff Bezos’ executive team responsible for overall direction and operations of Amazon. Under her guidance as the Head of Worldwide Supply Chain and Fulfillment, Amazon achieved the largest product selection on earth and implemented a novel retail supply chain controlling the move of every item, every associate and every package with precision in real time, worldwide.

During her work on Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos Nadia started to think about the ultimate experience of shopping for tactile items. She left Amazon in 2012 with the vision to change the physical retail experience from the inside out. Earlier in her career, Nadia served as Managing Director of Mobilocity, Inc. She was head of System Development for Exelon Power Team. And, she held various roles at Starlight Multimedia, Diamond Management and Technology, AT&T, and Robcad. Nadia has been an Independent Non-Executive Director of Ferguson plc since July, 2017 and she has been a Member of the Supervisory Board at Cimpress N.V. since January 2015 where she also serves as its Non-Executive Director.

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Sven Strohband, Ph.D.

Sven is the chief technology officer (CTO) of Khosla Ventures and an engineer at heart. He has worked on numerous technologies ranging from autonomous robots, automotive LED front lighting, user interface and display technologies to RFID systems for production verification. During his tenure at KV, Sven has led the technical diligence for numerous investment opportunities in both IT and sustainability. He is excited by technologies that enable novel user experiences or markedly change the efficiency of operations.

Prior to joining KV, Sven spent six years at Mohr Davidow Ventures, starting as an associate and culminating as the CTO of the firm, where he led the firm-wide technical diligence process for the infrastructure IT and sustainability practices. During this time, Sven worked with technology companies in areas ranging from advertising automation to columnar storage. He also helped portfolio companies recruit technical talent, manage milestones, run product-market fit experiments and craft fundraising strategies.

Previously, Sven was a project manager for the Electronics Research Lab of Volkswagen in Silicon Valley, where he led numerous technical projects for all Volkswagen brands ranging from LED front lighting (Audi), electro chromic glass (Volkswagen), RFID systems for production verification, driver assistance systems and robotics. His duties included leading the technical team, presenting research findings to board-level executives at the company’s headquarters in Germany, crafting intellectual property roadmaps and the adoption strategy of those technologies by different brands. The most visible project was likely his role as the lead engineer and project lead for the Stanford racing team’s autonomous car, Stanley. Stanley became the foundation for the Google self-driving car project and also won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and is now on display at the Smithsonian Museum.

Sven holds a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University, where he served as system administrator for the mechanical engineering department’s computer network to finance his studies. He also holds a doctor of philosophy degree in mechanics and computation from Stanford University. His Ph.D. research was funded by IBM and Intel and focused on the simulation of failure in semiconductor structures using high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

In his spare time, Sven enjoys teaching his kids to code, flying autonomous drones and cycling. He also regularly serves as a mentor for Stanford’s E245 “Lean Launchpad” class.

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Tom Wagner, Ph.D.

Tom is the CEO at Berkshire Grey. Tom believes in delivering value to customers, ethics, and pulling forward new technology to create customer value. Under his direction, these are the guiding principles for the company. Tom’s background includes career management of hundreds of millions in development dollars, P&L, and GM functions. Between Tom’s efforts and those of the BG team, their work has resulted in billions in topline revenue associated with products that deliver value to customers.

Previously, Tom had the privilege of serving as the Chief Technology Officer of iRobot. iRobot is a publicly traded company with a multi-billion dollar market capitalization and is recognized for shipping more robot products than any other company anywhere in the world. Today iRobot automates tasks around home. During Tom’s tenure, iRobot was also a recognized world leader in mobile robot products that grasped objects in unstructured and dynamic domains. Such systems were used effectively in the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown and are in use today by the military and in other industrial settings.

Prior to joining iRobot, Tom served at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, where he managed programs in artificial intelligence, robotics, logistics, communications, command and control, tele-health, connected devices, and connected intelligent assistants. Earlier in his career, Tom served as a principal lead at Honeywell, a professor at the University of Maine, and in leadership and advisory roles in small & startup companies. Early career positions include General Motors and other various and sundry places and functions from databases to manufacturing backpacks. He holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a M.S. from the University of New Hampshire, and a B.S. from Michigan State University.

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Real Robotics Ready Now

We take a holistic approach to intelligent robotics; solving real problems with solutions that work right now.

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in the news

Businessweek: These Robots Help Amazon’s Competitors Narrow the Delivery Gap

December 6, 2018

NRF Startup Spotlight: Robotics firm brings smart fulfillment to ecommerce

March 6, 2020

The Technology Headlines: Robotics Issue - Berkshire Grey Cover Story

May 20, 2019

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