House

Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley, and a Co-Founder and Faculty Partner at AI@The House. He holds a Master's in Mathematics from Arizona State University and a PhD in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego (1985), and was a professor at MIT from 1988 to 1998. His research spans computational, statistical, cognitive, and biological sciences, including Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, kernel machines, and applications to distributed systems, natural language processing, and statistical genetics.

Trevor Darrell is a faculty member in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, where he leads Berkeley's DeepDrive (BDD) Industrial Consortia, co-directs the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab, and serves as Faculty Director of PATH. His research focuses on algorithms for large-scale perceptual learning, including object and activity recognition and detection, with applications spanning autonomous vehicles, media search, and multimodal interaction with robots and mobile devices. He was previously on the MIT EECS faculty from 1999 to 2008, holds S.M. and PhD degrees from MIT, and earned a B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Zachary Hargreaves is Managing Partner at The House Fund, where he leads Series A and later-stage investments in Berkeley-born startups. He previously worked as an investor at Founders Fund, contributing to investments including SpaceX and Stemcentrx. A UC Berkeley graduate in electrical engineering and computer science, he also worked on NASA's Mars rover landing project and co-founded the aerospace startup Vires Aeronautics.

David Bloom is an investor at House, a fund focused on UC Berkeley founders. While a student at UC Berkeley, he invested in student founders through Dorm Room Fund and was involved with Kairos. After graduating he worked in venture capital at Global Founders Capital, investing across stages and geographies, and then spent five years at Signia Venture Partners focusing on early-stage founders. He also leads NextGen Partners, an organization for pre-partner level investors.

David Bloom, an investor since his 20s from UC Berkeley, focuses on Berkeley founders productizing tribal knowledge in legacy industries via computer vision and generative AI and heads NextGen Partners.

Prakash Janakiraman is a Visiting Partner and Head of the AI Accelerator at The House Fund. He co-founded Nextdoor as its technical co-founder and held leadership roles including VP Engineering, Chief Architect, and Head of DEIB from the company's founding through its 2021 IPO (NYSE: NXDR), with prior engineering work at Excite@Home, Shopping.com, and Google Maps. After leaving Nextdoor in late 2022, he returned to UC Berkeley to complete a bachelor's degree in Sociology and advises and invests in early-stage startups.

Taz Patel co-founded Captiv8, a social analytics platform serving brands and influencers. He previously served as CRO at Republic Project (acquired by Sizmek) and held sales leadership roles at Interclick and BlueLithium, both acquired by Yahoo!. He is also an angel investor, startup advisor, and mentor.

Annie Tsai is a Part-Time Partner at The House Fund and CEO and Founder of ETC, through which she advises early-stage and scaling software companies on go-to-market, operations, and customer success. She previously served as Chief Customer Officer at DoubleDutch and as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Customer Officer at Demandforce, which was acquired by Intuit, and earlier led customer experience at PGi. She holds an Interdisciplinary Studies degree in New Media and Communications, with a minor in Contemporary English Literature, from UC Berkeley.

Arjun Arora is a Part-Time Partner at The House Fund and is "In Residence" at Expa, also advising funds, startups, and large corporations. He was previously a Partner at 500 Startups, where he handled direct investments, accelerator investing, and investor relations, and earlier founded and led ReTargeter (acquired by Sellpoints in 2015). His prior roles include head of business development at Yahoo! Real Estate and advising on M&A and IPOs at Jefferies Broadview, and he holds degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Entrepreneurship & Technology from UC Berkeley.

Leandrew Robinson is a Part-Time Partner at The House Fund and an entrepreneur whose ventures collectively generated $500 million in e-commerce sales. He founded the Y Combinator-backed dropship platform Hingeto.com, which raised $2.8M and served over 20,000 online stores, and joined shipping software company Auctane as an executive after selling it. Earlier he held a senior role at the e-tailer Karmaloop, and he began his career while studying at UC Berkeley, where he ran a t-shirt company.

Sydney Thomas is a Venture Partner at The House Fund and the Founder and General Partner of Symphonic Capital, which invests in companies aimed at improving life for the majority of people. She has built a network around this investment thesis through a podcast, a newsletter, and events, and participates in initiatives to increase diversity in tech, including roles with BLCK VC, Colorwave, and Invanti. She holds a Public Policy Studies degree from Duke University and an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Sydney Thomas is Founder and General Partner of Symphonic Capital, co-leading the firm's strategy alongside Shruti Shah.

Jeremy Fiance founded The House Fund in 2016 after graduating from UC Berkeley. While a student there, he co-launched entrepreneurship-focused groups including Kairos Society Berkeley and Free Ventures, which supported over 50 startups. He focuses on backing and strengthening the Berkeley startup community and its founders.

Joseph Gonzalez is a UC Berkeley EECS researcher and a founding member of the university's RISE Lab, a cross-disciplinary effort spanning systems, machine learning, databases, and security. His research centers on Real-time Intelligent Secure Execution (RISE) — building algorithms and systems that can learn and act in real time on large-scale live data streams. He created the GraphX project, which unifies tables and graphs for graph analytics pipelines and is now part of Apache Spark and used in production at companies such as Alibaba Taobao. His work also spans low-latency model serving, hybrid online/offline learning, and hybrid synchronous/asynchronous system design.

Ken Goldberg is a roboticist, inventor, and artist who holds the William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley, with appointments in IEOR, EECS, and Art Practice. He co-founded Ambi Robotics and Jacobi Robotics, where he serves as Chief Scientist, and helped establish the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. As director of UC Berkeley's AUTOLab, he has published 400 peer-reviewed papers and holds 10 US patents, and his artwork has been exhibited internationally.

Kurt Keutzer earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University in 1984 and worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining Synopsys, Inc., where he became Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice-President of Research. Since 1998 he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where his research applies parallelism to accelerate training and deployment of deep neural networks for computer vision, speech recognition, multimedia analysis, and computational finance. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 1996 and has published extensively in hardware and design automation.

Marc Morgenstern is the Managing Partner and Founder of early-stage investor Blue Mesa Partners and has taught "Street Smart Startups" at UC Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. A dealmaker and entrepreneur, he has worked on 400+ transactions as principal, advisor, or counsel. He writes and speaks about deals, negotiating, and early-stage companies, authored "The Soul of the Deal" (2022), and holds a BA from Yale and a J.D. from Boston University.

Cici Tong is Assistant Controller at Playground Global, an early-stage venture capital firm, where she works on the finance team overseeing fund management and portfolio company reporting. She has more than six years of public accounting experience in tax services and over a year in fund administration serving clients in the investment management industry, including private equity, venture capital, and fund of funds. Tong is a California-licensed CPA.