Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs recruits tech experts for new advisory board

Pioneer Square Labs is tapping a few of Seattle’s main expertise researchers and innovators with the creation of a brand new advisory board to assist assist the early stage corporations in its startup studio and enterprise fund portfolio.

PSL’s new Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will work carefully with the agency’s inside workers, in addition to related startups, to supply counsel throughout expertise themes and assist firm sourcing and diligence.

The group contains high researchers from the College of Washington; execs at tech giants; and veteran startup operators. They embody:

• Ed Lazowska (chair), professor and Invoice & Melinda Gates Chair Emeritus on the College of Washington’s laptop science college
• Yejin Choi, the Wissner-Slivka Chair of the UW’s laptop science college and a senior analysis director on the Allen Institute for Synthetic Intelligence (Ai2)
• Ali Farhadi, CEO of Ai2 and a professor on the UW’s laptop science college
• Lili Cheng, company vp of Microsoft Cloud and AI
• Shwetak Patel, Washington Analysis Basis Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor on the UW’s laptop science college, and head of well being applied sciences at Google
• Joe Beda, founding father of Kubernetes, and founding father of Heptio (acquired by VMware)
• Bharat Shah, former company vp of Microsoft Azure Cloud Safety and Microsoft for Startups
• Jesse Rothstein, co-founder and former CEO of ExtraHop
• Diego Oppenheimer, associate at Manufacturing unit and founder and former CEO of Algorithmia (acquired by DataRobot)

The creation of the group was pushed partially by the agency’s latest give attention to AI, mentioned PSL Managing Director Greg Gottesman.

“We imagine that AI will essentially change the expertise panorama from infrastructure to purposes, and we’re investing in deeper applied sciences which might be on the forefront of this modification,” he mentioned. “We wished to carry on world-class experience as we developed our theses and labored with entrepreneurs in these areas, so including TAB with members who’re the perfect in these areas makes a variety of sense.”

Gottesman mentioned the board was modeled off comparable applications at different enterprise corporations.

The group’s 9 members will obtain fairness in PSL’s enterprise fund and meet usually.

“The chance to attach with us, top-notch entrepreneurs, and one another is interesting and helpful as nicely,” Gottesman famous.

PSL raised $20 million for its third fund final 12 months to assist its studio, which has spun out greater than 35 corporations together with Boundless, Recurrent, SingleFile, and others. The PSL Ventures fund raised $100 million in 2021. PSL Ventures invests in PSL studio spinouts, however doesn’t lead funding rounds in these corporations. It does, nonetheless, usually lead rounds in exterior (non-studio) corporations.

Earlier this 12 months PSL inked a co-investing partnership with Silicon Valley enterprise agency Mayfield to fund AI-focused startups.