| Liat Aaronson | Aaronson | Horizen Labs | Israel | , | Herzliya | Middle East | Marker LLC | 22 | A member of Class 22, Liat served her fellowship under the mentorship of Sham Sandhu at Marker LLC in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Scott Brady of Innovation Endeavors. She also served as a mentor to Eyal Mayer (Class 21). | Liat Aaronson is the co-founder and CSO of Horizen Labs, a blockchain technology company offering developer tools and solutions for businesses needing enhanced trust and transparency when dealing in multi-party environments (i.e. competitors, supply chain members, etc. ). Before that she served as the COO of Selina Hospitality. Prior to the operations role, Liat was an Investment Partner at Marker LLC, a leading Israel-New York based venture capital firm, where she continues to oversee their follow-on annex fund. Prior to joining Marker, Liat was the Executive Director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at IDC. The innovative venture creation program she helped grow and develop in the ten years of her leadership that allows undergraduates in their final year of study at IDC to experience entrepreneurship hands-on taking ideas and developing them in to funded startups. Many successful companies, including Gift’s Project, Wibiya, Wibbitz, Bizzabo and Argus were founded out of the program. Today she remains involved as acting chairwoman of Zell and is the director of the ZEP Fund LTD. which invests and manages a portfolio of 21 Zell alumni companies. She holds a B.A. in political economy of industrial societies (economics and political science, cum laude) from the University of California at Berkeley, an LL.B. and MBA from Tel Aviv University, and an LL.M. in European law from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands (cum laude). She became a member of the Israel Bar Association in 1999, after completing her internship at Kantor, Elhanani, Tal & Co. She attained practical experience in mergers and acquisitions and new ventures, as an associate attorney at Naschitz, Brandes & Co., a position she held until joining IDC Herzliya in 2005. Liat is a board member at Wristcam and at Infinity Pension Fund, and a member of the Friends of IDC’s advisory board. Liat is on the advisory boards of WiSe, Weizman Institute’s entrepreneurship program and Scola, the 81 Unit entrepreneurship program. | She holds a BA in political economy of industrial societies (economics and political science, cum laude) from the University of California at Berkeley, an LLB and MBA from Tel Aviv University, and an LLM in European law from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands (cum laude).
Liat became a member of the Israel Bar Association in 1999, after completing her internship at Kantor, Elhanani, Tal & Co. She attained practical experience in M&A and new ventures as an associate attorney at Naschitz, Brandes & Co., a position she held until joining IDC Herzliya in 2005. | 22 |
| Dan Abelon | Abelon | Two Sigma Ventures | United States | New York, | New York | NY/CT | VenSeed | 19 | As a member of Class 19, Dan performed his fellowship at VenSeed. | Dan joined Two Sigma Ventures as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in 2015. Today he invests in startups that use advanced tech such as data science, AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics.
Dan is a serial entrepreneur and investor. His investing activities include VenSeed, an accelerator for high-potential venture capital managers, Edge Harris, a family office in New York that he is helping to establish a seed fund.
Dan has helped incubate technology products including ReadyGraph, a SaaS tool that allows websites to automate their growth; and SIGNL, a big data tool that detects when private companies start achieving momentum. Previously, Dan co-founded SpeedDate.com, a venture-backed online dating service with over 23 million members that was sold to IAC. In order to bring the speed dating concept online, Dan gained expertise in growth hacking, subscription payments, web analytics, and mobile product development.
Prior to launching SpeedDate, Dan worked for IBM’s Business Consulting Services. He also spent time in Lazard’s Technology Mergers and Acquisitions Group and at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation where he sourced investments in agriculture and information technology in the Philippines. | Dan holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received his BA in economics and philosophy from Columbia University, where he cofounded the Columbia Entrepreneurship Club and grew an advertising business through the university’s incubator.
Dan loves to travel, and has worked in international development as a volunteer in various countries, including Ghana, Thailand, and Ukraine. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the keytar, composing digital music, skiing, and biking. Dan serves as an Endeavor Expert, mentoring entrepreneurs in the developing world, and is a member of the Manhattan chapter of YPO. | 19 |
| Benjamin Abram | Abram | Wylan Energy | United States | California, | Menlo Park | Northern CA | Westly Group | 14 | As a member of Class 14, Ben served his fellowship at the Westly Group under the mentorship of Mike Dorsey and Managing Partner Steve Westly. | Ben is the founder of Wylan Energy. For Ben, this company is the culmination of nearly a decade of research around business ideas that produce significant and scalable energy efficiency savings. Wylan Energy runs rebate and subsidy programs in select jurisdictions to enable everyday consumers to go green, less expensively.
Overlapping his time with Wylan, Ben spent 5 years as an associate-in-residence for The Westly Group, a clean technology-oriented venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. As the second employee of this fund, Ben assisted its founder, Steve Westly, in raising $127 million in their first institutional fund. At Westly, Ben served as a board observer at OhSo Clean, a sanitation company, and at Glacier Bay, a power management company whose battery-powered auxiliary unit enables truck fleets to save one gallon of fuel per hour of use by meeting the air-conditioning needs of their operators without idling their engines.
As an individual, Ben is also an advisor to IncentAlign, an enterprise software company that enables large institutions to allocate resources more efficiently and effectively with a market-based approach. Initial applications include allocating sales territories and accounts. | Ben is a graduate of Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, graduating with a bachelor's degree with dual majors in civil & environmental engineering and public policy studies.
Ben serves or has served on a number of non-profit boards, including the Chordoma Foundation, FACE AIDS, and the Duke University Board of Trustees. He is from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. | 14 |
| Jan Adams | Adams | EMBL Ventures | Germany | , | Heidelberg | Europe | EMBL Ventures | 11 | A member of Class 11, Jan was mentored by Stefan Herr at EMBL Ventures in Heidelberg, Germany. | Jan joined EMBL Ventures in 2002 and is now a Managing Director with the firm, focusing on opportunities in the life science and medical device sectors. He has been representing the firm on various portfolio boards including Endoart Medical Technology, Lipid Therapeutics, Allercra Therapeutics, and Opsona Therapeutics.
Prior to joining EMBL Ventures, Jan was a postdoctoral fellow of the Ernst Schering Research Foundation at the University of Granada, Spain, where his research focused on stem cells. Prior to that he was a fellow of the Boehringer Ingelheim Research Foundation, conducting work on molecular transport mechanisms at the Wellcome CRC in Cambridge, UK. | Jan holds an MS in biochemistry & molecular biology from Tubingen University, Germany and completed a PhD in genetics at the University of Cambridge, UK. | 11 |
| Sola Adeola | Adeola | L.A.T. Clevson | Nigeria | , | Victoria Island, Lagos | Africa | Institute for Venture Design | 15 | A member of Class 15, Sola served her fellowship at The Institute for Venture Design under the mentorship of Muhtar Bakare. | Sola is Head of Corporate Strategy at L.A.T. Clevson, a boutique investment firm with offices in Nigeria and London that invests in African startups. The firm's investment model aims to generate wealth that contributes to economic development. As such, its portfolio companies often sit at the convergence of several sectors; the firm invests proprietary capital or strategic co-investments, custom-tailored to the needs of each venture
Previously. Sola was the Executive Secretary of the Freedom Foundation, a Lagos, Nigeria-based nonprofit whose mission is to reach out, give hope, rehabilitate, educate, and empower impoverished persons in Nigeria through community-based programs and initiatives in order to achieve individual and community transformation.
Sola is also the founder of Designing Futures, a business incubator focused on startups in the education sector. DF is a platform for individuals who want to launch initiatives (for-profit and nonprofit) to solve education challenges and be financially sustainable.
Earlier, Sola was the Nigerian project coordinator for The Institute for Venture Design (IVD or The Institute), a partnership between Stanford’s Centre for Design Research (CDR) and the FATE Foundation. The Institute aims to increase the level of innovation and technological development in Nigeria through the incubation and building up of a culture of entrepreneurs, innovators, and risk takers. Sola was the lead Nigerian counterpart managing the partnership with Stanford CDR and working to set up the organization and facilitate programs.
Sola's past work experience has been in the field of management consulting, working for Accenture and Dalberg Global Development Advisors. | Sola has a Bachelor of Science in foreign service (BSFS) from Georgetown University and a Master's in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she focused on education policy. | 15 |
