VC Panel Talk

Lisha is a principal at Amplify Partners. She focuses on companies that leverage machine learning and data to solve problems and she is excited to be investing at a time when algorithmic and data-driven methods have such incredible potential for impact. Lisha completed her PhD at UC Berkeley focusing on deep learning and probability applied to the problem of clustering in graphs. She worked with Prof. David Aldous and Prof. Joan Bruna and was supported by the prestigious NSERC CGS fellowship. While at Berkeley she also did statistical consulting, advising on methods and analysis for experimentation and interpretation, and interned as a data scientist at Pinterest and Stitch Fix. She was the lecturer of discrete mathematics, as well as the graduate instructor for probability and statistics and intro CS theory. Prior to that, she earned her Master of Science in Mathematics at the University of Toronto, with Highest Distinction advised by Prof. Balazs Szegedy in the area of Graph Limits.

I started rebelling against my parents when I was nine years old by staying up all night to game, hack, and program a new computer. A few years later, I taught myself 3D computer graphics and IP networking while working for EPRI and Stanford University, the local hub for the Internet’s precursor, the NSFNET. At 19, I helped start GlobalCenter, one of the first web hosting providers, with initial customers such as CNN, Netscape, Playboy, and Yahoo!More recently, I was a General Partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, from April 2012 to November 2014. During my tenure I started the seed practice and led investments in Lytro, Periscope.io, Quora, and Ravel Law, in addition to co-founding Coolan.

Leo was the 2nd engineering hire at Linkedin, early engineer at Factual, and an ex-Googler, specializing in big data and machine learning. He placed 5th in ‘01 Top Coder Invitational programming competition and was a member of Caltech's world finalist ACM programming team.