Meet AV’s Blockchain Fund Advisors

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Published on

September 16, 2022

Our venture advisors serve as an important resource for our Blockchain Fund. We appointed industry experts from our personal networks to help review and score investment opportunities and provide overall guidance and counsel to our investing team. See below to learn about some of the advisors helping us build diversified portfolios of disruptive blockchain innovations.

Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn

CEO and President, Claridad

Jeanne currently sits on 3 public infrastructure company boards: Xylem (NYSE:XYL), Edison International (NYSE:EIX) and Columbus McKinnon (Nasdaq: CMCO), as well as several private company boards. Prior to this, she had a long career with Cisco and led strategy, planning, GTM and P&L operations (COO and Chief of strategy role) of Cisco's highly profitable and largest services and software portfolio. She was also the founder of IoT Talent Consortium and has been recognized as one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Business. Jeanne has extensive knowledge around IoT, networking, AI and automation. We are fortunate to have Jeanne participating in our investor committee meetings around AI/IoT infrastructure services such as Helium Network.

Spencer Foust

Managing Director, Sozo Ventures

Spencer Foust is a Managing Director at Sozo Ventures where he invests in leading global technology companies. Sozo Ventures focuses on helping companies with global ambitions launch and fuel their Asia and Japan growth operations. Since 2016, Sozo has invested over $250M in and helped the international expansion efforts of companies such as Twitter, Palantir, Project44, Square, Coinbase, Chainalysis, MongoDB, Flexport, Zoom, Servicemax, Applied Intuition, Attentive, Clear Co, Cohesity, Harmonic AI and others. Spencer previously worked with Apple on global iPhone Operations as a Program Manager, and worked on the B61 Nuclear Weapon program at Sandia National Labs as a Systems Engineer. He was one of the youngest in the history of the lab to receive a Top Secret ‘Q’ Security Clearance at 20 years old, and was awarded the NNSA Defense Programs Award of Excellence. Spencer is also on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2021. We are fortunate to have Spencer participating in our investor committee meetings around web3 deals with global potential such as Helium Network and Napster.

Rumi Morales

Partner and Board Member, Outlier Ventures

Rumi was most recently head of venture and growth investing for Digital Currency Group, the parent organization of global digital asset prime broker Genesis, digital currency asset manager Grayscale Investments, financial media firm Coindesk, cryptocurrency platform Luno and trading platform TradeBlock. She is also a partner and board member of Outlier Ventures, a leading accelerator for the Open Metaverse & Web 3. Previously, Rumi was executive director of CME Ventures, a CME Group subsidiary that makes strategic investments in early stage technologies that may impact the financial market space. We are fortunate to have Rumi participating in our investor committee meetings around web3 innovations such as Helium Network.

Oke Okaro

SVP & Chief Product Officer, Reuters

Oke Okaro is a technology executive and pioneering innovator in the media and mobile technology industry. He was SVP in Disney running business operations, disney media & entertainment distribution. Prior to Disney, Oke was VP of Digital Experience at Verizon. He founded ESPN Mobile in 2004 and ESPN Interactive TV in 2005. In 2010, he started the mobile business at Bloomberg L.P. In 2015, he founded Burner, a wellness technology platform. Oke is also an investor in our fall vintage blockchain fund. We are fortunate to have Oke participating in our investor committee meetings around metaverse, NFT and web3 media deals such as Stadium Live and Napster.

David Tse

Thomas Kailath and Guanghan Xu Professor, Stanford University School of Engineering

David is a Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Prof Tse was elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2018. He was the recipient of the IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award in 2017 and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2019. Previously, he received a NSF CAREER award in 1998, the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society in 2000 and a Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering in 2012. He received multiple best paper awards, and was also the inventor of the proportional-fair scheduling algorithm, used in all modern-day cellular systems, serving 3 billion subscribers around the world. His research interests are in information theory, blockchains, and machine learning. He is also a co-founder of Babylon network, a fall vintage blockchain fund co-investment with IDG capital and Breyer Capital (Jim Breyer, founding partner of Accel). We are fortunate to have David participating in our investor committee meetings around deep technical web3 infrastructure deals such as Subspace Network.

Richard Widmann

Head of Strategy for Digital Assets, Google Cloud

Widmann is leading Google’s expansion into the blockchain ecosystem alongside the newly formed Digital Assets team. He was previously Product Counsel at Google where he advised Finance and Treasury on legal and regulatory matters. He architected Google's earliest blockchain partnerships with companies like Hedera and Dapper Labs. He has nearly a decade of experience advising senior executives on blockchain-based regulatory and transactional matters. Before Google, Widmann was a litigator at Sidley Austin, where he focused his practice on high-profile white-collar criminal investigations and DOJ/SEC enforcement actions. We anticipate collaborating with Richard on regulatory matters and fostering seamless integration between traditional technology and blockchain.