Annie Tsai is CEO, Founder at EdioLabs and a Part-Time Partner at The House Fund.
Annie was previously Chief Customer Officer at DoubleDutch (event engagement platform, raised $70M+ from KKR, Bessemer and others). In that role, she led customer success, customer operations, account management, and people operations through the company’s evolution to a SaaS platform model.
Prior to DoubleDutch, Annie was Chief Marketing Officer & Chief Customer Officer at DemandForce, where she helped establish the company’s market leadership position that led to its acquisition by Intuit. Before that, she worked at PGi the world’s largest dedicated provider of collaboration software and services.
Annie graduated from UC Berkeley with an Interdisciplinary Studies degree focused on New Media and Communications. She also received a Minor in Contemporary English Literature.
Arjun Arora is a Part-Time Partner at The House Fund. He is also "In Residence" at Expa and advises funds, startups and Fortune 100 companies. Most recently a Partner at 500 Startups, he actively invested through the accelerator, did direct investments, assisted with the regional 500 funds and also led the Investor Relations efforts for the firm.
Arjun was the Founder of ReTargeter which was acquired by Sellpoints (March 2015). He was the founding CEO of ReTargeter and bootstrapped the company to be in the top 100 of Inc's Fastest Growing Companies list in 2013. He is a recognized expert in display advertising and retargeting and has been interviewed on Bloomberg TV, been quoted in the WSJ and been mentioned in Forbes. He has been recognized at the White House, at the UN and at the Global Summit for Entrepreneurship for his success and commitment to a values centered organization.
Previously, he was at Yahoo! Real Estate as head of business development, instrumental in helping bring residential listings online in the early days on real estate on the web. And prior, he was at the international investment bank Jefferies Broadview where he advised on M&A deals and IPOs for various technology companies during his tenure.
Arjun advises various start-up companies in the Silicon Valley with strategic planning, monetization and funding. He is also an angel investor to multiple companies and a LP at 500 Startups.
Arjun graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Entrepreneurship & Technology.
Jason Wang is serial entrepreneur and startup investor. He is a Part-Time Partner at The House Fund and most recent company he founded is Caviar, which is a food delivery infrastructure for restaurants. They first launched in July of 2012 and grew to 7-figure annual revenue and profitability within the first 6 months. In August of 2014, Caviar was acquired by Square.
Jason sold his last business, Munch On Me, in May 2012. The service was a daily deals platform for specific dishes at restaurants. They were part of the Summer 2011 batch at Y Combinator.
Jason’s first company was 815 Productions, which was a profitable mobile app development company founded in 2010. They made award-winning apps on Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, and Android; their app myCraigsAds was ranked in the top 2% of its category in the Windows marketplace.
In early 2012, Jason also started a food blog, City Foodsters, where they uncover local culinary gems. They’ve been featured on the 7x7 SF Magazine and also received 30,000 unique readers within the 1st year. Their photography has been displayed on the front page of Food Porn Daily, Food Gawker, and other sites.
Prior to pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams, Jason worked in various roles at Google, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Microsoft. Jason has a diverse background in the Financial, Technology, and Restaurant industries. He likes to stay motivated everyday, dream big, and have a positive mindset.
Jason graduated with a B.S. Business Administration from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is a Co-Founder & Faculty Partner at AI@The House. He received his Masters in Mathematics from Arizona State University, and earned his PhD in Cognitive Science in 1985 from the University of California, San Diego. He was a professor at MIT from 1988 to 1998. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive and biological sciences, and have focused in recent years on Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, kernel machines and applications to problems in distributed computing systems, natural language processing, signal processing and statistical genetics. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He received the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015 and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. He is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, ASA, CSS, IEEE, IMS, ISBA and SIAM.
Dawn Song is CEO and Co-Founder of Oasis Labs, Professor in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and Co-Founder & Faculty Partner at AI@The House.
Dawn has spent significant time researching and building security and privacy technologies, specifically in the areas of software, networking, distributed systems, applied cryptography, blockchains, smart contracts, and machine learning. She has been recognized for contributions in computer security through numerous prestigious awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, the Faculty Research Award from IBM, Google and other major tech companies, and Best Paper Awards from top conferences in Computer Security and Deep Learning.
She is ranked the most cited scholar in computer security (AMiner Award). She is a serial entrepreneur, including Ensighta Security (acquired by FireEye Inc.) and Menlo Security. She obtained her PhD from UC Berkeley.
Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department at University of California at Berkeley, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman at Databricks, and Co-Founder & Faculty Partner at AI@The House.
He does research on cloud computing and networked computer systems. Past work includes Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Tachyon, Chord DHT, and Dynamic Packet State (DPS). He is an ACM Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2015), the SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2011), and the ACM doctoral dissertation award (2001).
In 2013, he co-founded Databricks a startup to commercialize technologies for Big Data processing, and in 2006 he co-founded Conviva, a startup to commercialize technologies for large scale video distribution.
Kurt received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Indiana University in 1984 and then joined the research division of AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1991 he joined Synopsys, Inc. where he ultimately became Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice-President of Research. In 1998 Kurt became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley.
Kurt’s research group is currently focused on using parallelism to accelerate the training and deployment of Deep Neural Networks for applications in computer vision, speech recognition, multi-media analysis, and computational finance. Kurt has published six books, over 250 refereed articles, and is among the most highly cited authors in Hardware and Design Automation. Kurt was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1996.
Kurt’s earlier research has had a lasting impact on Electronic Design Automation. For example, at the 50th Design Automation Conference Kurt received a number of awards reflecting achievements over the 50 year history of the conference. These awards included for "Top Ten Cited Author", "Top Ten Cited Paper" and he was also recognized as among one of only three people to have received four Best Paper Awards in the history of the conference.
While at Synopsys he worked with the General Counsel to co-develop the company’s intellectual property strategy. Since joining Berkeley he has consulted directly with high-tech companies to do assessments of large (100+ patent) portfolios to assess their defensibility and monetary value. He has also worked, as time has allowed, as an IP consultant on individual patent infringement cases with many of Silicon Valley’s top IP law firms.
As an angel investor Kurt has participated in the capital formation of twelve start-up companies including Coverity and Tensilica. Of these twelve, six have already seen profitable exits and two are still independent and growing. Kurt has also served as an advisor to nine other start-ups including two that went on to become public companies.
Pressed with finding an outside minor during his doctoral studies Kurt chose Tibetan studies. He has continued that research interest to this day, and he currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center. Working with Zach Rowinski, the two have developed an optical character recognition system for Tibetan script. The Namsel system has OCR'd over one-million pages of Tibetan texts and the results are available at TBRC. Kurt has also published two journal articles on the Bon tradition of Tibet in Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines.
Pieter Abbeel (BS/MS EE KU Leuven, 2000; PhD CS Stanford, 2008, Advisor: Andrew Ng) is professor at UC Berkeley (EECS, BAIR) since 2008, Co-Founder & President at Covariant, Co-Founder at Gradescope, Co-Founder & Faculty Partner at AI@The House and was previously a Research Scientist at OpenAI.
Pieter has developed apprenticeship learning algorithms which have enabled advanced helicopter aerobatics, including maneuvers such as tic-tocs, chaos and auto-rotation, which only exceptional human pilots can perform. His group has enabled the first end-to-end completion of reliably picking up a crumpled laundry article and folding it and has pioneered deep reinforcement learning for robotics, including learning locomotion and visuomotor skills. His work has been featured in many popular press outlets, including BBC, New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Discovery Channel, SmartPlanet and Wired.
His current research focuses on robotics and machine learning with particular focus on deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, deep unsupervised learning, meta-learning, learning-to-learn, and AI safety.
Prof. Darrell is a faculty member in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He leads Berkeley’s DeepDrive (BDD) Industrial Consortia, is co-Director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab, and is Faculty Director of PATH at UC Berkeley.
Darrell’s group develops algorithms for large-scale perceptual learning, including object and activity recognition and detection, for a variety of applications including autonomous vehicles, media search, and multimodal interaction with robots and mobile devices. Prof. Darrell wass previously on the faculty of the MIT EECS department from 1999-2008, where he directed the Vision Interface Group. He received the S.M., and PhD. degrees from MIT in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He obtained the B.S.E. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988.
Prof. Darrell also serves as Co-Founder & Faculty Partner at AI@The House, consulting Chief Scientist at Nexar, and as a technical consultant on deep learning and computer vision for Pinterest. Darrell is on the scientific advisory board of several other ventures, including DeepScale, WaveOne, SafelyYou, and Graymatics.
Jeremy Fiance is Founder & Managing Partner at The House Fund.
Jeremy is dedicated to strengthening Berkeley's startup community and equipping Berkeley founders with the tools needed to build great businesses.
Jeremy was previously an investor at CrunchFund, Dorm Room Fund SF, and Keiretsu Forum. As an entrepreneur, Jeremy co-founded a health data science startup called Dropsense.
While a student at UC Berkeley, Jeremy proved the campus' startup potential co-launching several initiatives, including Kairos Society Berkeley and Free Ventures, that have sparked over 50 startups that raised $50M by the time he graduated.
Outside of the technology and startup world, Jeremy is a black belt in Tang Soo Do, table tennis gold medalist, amateur cartoonist, live music enthusiast, and die hard Cal fan. Go Bears!
Cameron Baradar is a Partner at The House Fund.
He is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and previously worked as a research engineer on microfluidic based point of care diagnostics. His most recent role prior to The House Fund was as a software engineer and employee #3 at the analytics startup Mapsense, which was acquired by Apple in 2015.
While a student at Cal, he was Co-Founder & Managing Director of Free Ventures, a student-run incubator with an average follow on investment of $1M per team.
He has been working to support Berkeley startups for the past six years. He lives in Berkeley and when not working can be found at a Cal football or basketball game, or hiking in the Bay Area.
Brett Wilson is VP, GM of Advertising at Adobe and Venture Partner at The House Fund.
Brett joined Adobe via the company's acquisition of TubeMogul, where Brett was co-founder and CEO. After guiding TubeMogul through a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO), Brett oversaw the launch of PTV, the world's first automated solution for planning and buying linear TV advertising.
Brett's emphasis on company culture and product innovation has translated into multiple awards, including the highest ranking among "Video Advertising Demand-Side Platforms" (Forrester) and "Best Places to Work" (Glassdoor). Brett began his career at Accenture, where he led system implementations for Fortune 100 clients.
He received his MBA at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, where he and co-founder John Hughes won the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition in 2007. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Brett has been featured in Advertising Age, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
