Lam Capital Venture Competition
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Jennifer Ard​

Biography

Jennifer Ard is a Managing Director and Head of Investment Operations located for Intel Capital. She joined the fund in 2011. ​

​In her role, Jen is responsible for managing Intel Capital’s investment-related operations and associated administrative matters. Additionally, she is primarily focused on investing in silicon-related companies and has been involved in multiple deals including Intel’s $3.2B investment in ASML. ​

​Jen currently serves as a director or observer on the board of AMFG, Fabric8Labs, Metalenz, MemVerge, UNISERS, and Impact Nano.​

Prior to Intel Capital, Jen was a Finance Controller at Intel. She graduated from Brigham Young University with her MBA and BS in Management and is a CFA Charterholder.​

Kevin Chen

Biography

Kevin joined Lam Capital mid-2020 bringing over 15 years of entrepreneurial and operating experience in materials-centric deep- and bio-tech companies. Most recently, Kevin was CEO of Crop Enhancement, an agriculture technology company commercializing novel products that replace synthetic pesticides, leading it from Seed through Series B. Prior to that, Kevin held senior roles at Hanergy (EVP of Silicon Valley Product Development Group) and Applied Materials (CMO of Energy and Environmental Solutions and GM of Energy Storage Solutions). Prior to Applied, Kevin led business development and product management efforts at NanoGram (acquired), AMD/Spansion, and Lumentum. Kevin’s passion for entrepreneurship was ignited early in his career when he co-founded Cumulus Photonics to commercialize innovative optical networking equipment. Kevin earned PhD and SM degrees in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT, a BS in Engineering Science from Penn State University, and is a Kauffman Fellows Finalist. He is a director of Crop Enhancement and mentor with the MIT VMS.

Audrey Charles

Biography

Audrey Charles is senior vice president of corporate strategy at Lam Research. In this position, held since 2020, she is responsible for leading the executive management team in the development of strategic priorities and key initiatives that support the company’s long-term profitable growth. Audrey also oversees Lam’s Corporate Development team and the company’s investment arm, Lam Capital, which invests in disruptive companies that advance the semiconductor ecosystem through next generation industrial automation, technology and product innovation, and new market opportunities. She brings a broad base of experience to her role, including engineering, marketing, customer management and investor relations. Since joining Lam in 1995, she has served in a range of leadership positions including senior vice president of Global Human Resources, vice president of corporate initiatives and chief of staff to the CEO. Audrey earned an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a B.S. in applied physics from Dublin City University.

Weili Dai

Biography

Weili Dai is one of the most successful women entrepreneurs in the world. Widely considered a technology visionary, she is the only woman Co-Founder of a global semiconductor company, Marvell Technology Group. ​

For her contributions to technology and society, Newsweek named Ms. Dai one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World”. Forbes Magazine listed Ms. Dai as one of the “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” and “America’s Richest Self-Made Women”. The Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) also recognized Ms. Dai with the prestigious 2013 Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award.​

Weili Dai holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Today, “Sutardja Dai Hall” named after Ms. Dai along with her husband, Sehat Sutardja, is home to the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).​

Ms. Dai is the Chairwoman of Lark Health through which she has become a powerful advocate for the better use of technology to improve the human condition. She’s now an extremely proud grandmother and continues to have a relentless passion to innovate through her various active roles in semiconductor technology and software companies –including Silicon Box, as Co-Founder, FLC Technology Group as the Co-Founder and President, and MeetKai, as Co-Founder and Executive Chairwoman, where she’s shaping the future of AI experiences.​

Rene Do​

Biography

Rene Do is a deep tech investment and business development professional, with 20+ years’ track record in semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automotive industries. She is passionate about innovation and building partnerships based on mutual value. She is currently Senior Director at SK Hynix, driving venture investments in emerging memory technology, fabrication process, AI, data infrastructure, IoT, and mobility areas. ​

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Prior to joining SK, Rene headed up technology partnerships at LG, where she boosted partnership success rate six-fold, enabling innovations in their mobile, home entertainment, and home appliance businesses. At Accenture, she orchestrated digital transformation and cloud strategies for Fortune 500 telco, electronics, and automotive clients. Rene delivered several top selling mobile devices in Asian markets during her time at Motorola, and was responsible for Samsung’s entry into portable and automotive display semiconductor business. ​

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Rene holds an MBA from INSEAD, as well as a BS degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University.​

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Glenn Ge

Biography

Dr. Glenn Ge is the CEO and co-founder of TetraMem Inc., a prominent Silicon Valley startup specializing in AI accelerators. ​

He has two decades of experience in the semiconductor industry, contributing to many innovations and product developments. Dr. Ge has co-authored over 20 research papers in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science and has approximately 800 global patent filings across more than 300 US/PCT patent families. Many of his inventions are now in mass production. ​

He holds three Master’s degrees, including an MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and a Ph.D. in Microelectronics from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.​

David (Dede) Goldschmidt

Biography

David (Dede) Goldschmidt is Managing Director and Head of Samsung Catalyst Fund, a multi-stage venture capital fund investing in deep-tech infrastructure and data-enabled platforms. ​

Previously, David was Founder and General Partner of Valley Venture Capital, and Managing Partner and CEO at Mofet Technology Fund. ​

Earlier in his career, David held executive and operational positions at ADC Broadband Multiservice Access Division (Nasdaq: ADCT) and at Teledata Communications (Nasdaq: TLDCF, acquired by ADC). ​

David holds an M.S. in Solid State Physics and a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Tel Aviv University.​

Ben Haskell

Biography

Ben is a Business Development Director at Lam Research and Principal at Lam Capital since 2023. Prior to joining Lam Capital, he developed and led Lam’s Technology Scouting program that identified, evaluated, and co-developed disruptive technologies in partnership with startups and established businesses alike. Before joining Lam, Ben was an entrepreneur and executive. He was co-founder and CEO of III-V CVD startup Inlustra Technologies, leading the company through its series B fundraising. He then joined micro-LED display startup Ostendo Technologies, where as Vice President of Technology he led nonpolar III-V epitaxy development and the company’s heterogeneous integration fab for monolithic displays. He has over 30 pending and issued patents and authored over 50 papers and book chapters with more than 3,500 citations. Ben earned his B.S.E in Materials Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and his Ph.D. in Materials from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

David Lam

Biography

David holds 25 years of global technology investment and operating experience, and has spent the nearly 20 years in the venture capital industry funding transformational technologies in Artificial Intelligence, Semiconductors and Enterprise Software. ​

He leads semiconductor investments at BRV Capital Management, a leading technology growth equity fund, and serves as a board member and advisor to several US and European venture capital funds and semiconductor companies. Previously, David was the Silicon Valley-based General Partner of Atlantic Bridge Capital, a Europe-based global technology investment firm. Prior to that, he held similar roles at two Asia-based technology venture and growth capital funds. David began his investment career at The Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm, and also worked as an investment banker at Robertson Stephens & Company. ​

He earned a BS in Industrial Engineering and an MA in Sociology from Stanford University, served as a California Executive Fellow in the Office of the Governor, and holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.​

Sharad Mehrotra

Biography

Bardi Pezeshki

Biography

Bardia Pezeshki has a PhD in EE from Stanford – worked on photonic devices at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and SDL.

He is the founder and CEO of two prior startups, Santur and Kaiam, the first of which developed the market leading tunable laser for long distance fiber optics in mid 2000’s and the second of which developed and manufactured leading 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s transceivers for datacenters.

He is the CEO of Avicena Tech, which developes a novel microLED data interconnect solution that enables optics with unprecedented performance for shorter distance communications.

Amir Salek

Biography

​Dr. Salek is a Senior Managing Director at Cerberus Capital Management, a global leader in alternative investing with $60+ billion in assets under management. He leads the firm’s investments in the broad ecosystem of technologies that enables the computer industry and sits on the boards of Avicena Technology, Eliyan Inc., and Untether AI.

​Before joining Cerberus in 2022, Dr. Salek was the founder and head of Silicon for Google Technical Infrastructure and Cloud (GCP) businesses for nearly 9 years. He started and led multiple lines of ground-breaking products that today are part of the de facto infrastructure behind all Google services. His work included building Google’s world-class AI infrastructure including the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) family of products which enabled the democratization of AI in a wide range of applications. Over the past three decades, Dr. Salek has led the development of products in a wide range of domains such as machine learning, networking, graphics, video, mobile processors, and EDA. Prior to his tenure at Google, Dr. Salek was a Senior Director of Engineering at Nvidia, where he was the Founder and head of Nvidia’s System-on-a-Chip Design organization.

​Dr. Salek holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Vera Schroeder

Biography

Vera Schroeder is a Partner and Investment Committee Member at Safar Partners. Vera brings broad experience in the fields of chemistry, nanoscience and materials science to the Safar team.

As a graduate student, she worked in the laboratory of Professor Tim Swager at MIT focused on carbon-nanotube based chemical sensing. While at MIT, she also spent her time at Sloan and HBX learning about venture creation and strategy as well as interning at MP Healthcare Venture Management fund.

She holds a BS and MS in Chemistry from RWTH Aachen University and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from MIT. She also acts as a Global Talent Fellow at the Open Avenues Foundation where she develops and leads technology transfer products, helping students gain skills that are valued in spinning out technology companies from universities.

Vera serves as a Board Director on the Boards of Concerto Biosciences, Ancilia Biosciences, and 2Pi Optics.

Sid Sheth

Biography

Sid Sheth co-founded d-Matrix in 2019 with a vision to build a new class of compute platform to deploy AI inference efficiently at-scale. In his role as CEO, Sid is leading a global team in developing a first-of-a-kind Generative AI inference solution using in-memory compute chiplet-based architectures, that promises to change the trajectory of commercially viable generative AI.

Sid has spent more than two decades as a business and technical leader transforming startups into industry leaders and steering publicly traded corporations toward groundbreaking innovations. Prior to d-Matrix, as Sr. Vice President & GM for the Networking Business Unit at Inphi Corporation, he incubated and grew the group into a $1B+ business by focusing on the cloud and enterprise data center segment. Prior to Inphi, Sid was at NetLogic Microsystems (now Broadcom) and Intel where he ran marketing and worked in R&D for cutting-edge networking chips and processors.

Sid earned his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, where he serves on the Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisory Board. He is a regularly featured speaker at industry tradeshows and conferences, is a published author at ISSCC and holds several patents.

Lucas Tsai

Biography

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, followed by a rich, all-around career in semiconductor spanning from Process R&D, Circuit Design, Marketing and Sales in a major ASIC house and top foundry. He is particularly specialized in bridging foundry and OEM because of his background in dealing with OEM business in ASIC, and his account management experience in the world #1 foundry.

In his tenure as Marketing Manager with LSI, he was instrumental in bridging LSI and foundry by developing a 0.11um ASIC platform, which later became one of the most successful ASIC technologies in LSI history. While he is with TSMC, he successfully developed SUN Microsystem’s UltraSPARC CPU business in a foundry environment, from 40nm to 7nm. He also developed another multi-billion-dollar business with a consumer OEM company by converting the business from a competitor’s ASIC model to TSMC’s foundry model, and in the meanwhile, enabled foundry business model to meet OEM’s stringent supply chain requirements. Recently he duplicated his success with another major cloud service provider and developed this business into the billion dollar club as well. He is currently responsible for all sales funnels, including emerging fabless and system accounts, and also market development, in North America region. He is also responsible for the revived corporate venture in the NA region.

Lucas was granted more than 20 US patents, and has published more than 40 papers in technical journals and conferences.

Vahid Vahedi

Biography

Vahid Vahedi is senior vice president and chief technology officer at Lam Research. In this role, he is responsible for driving innovation breakthroughs that define the next generation of semiconductors and result in the expansion of the company’s portfolio of best-in-class products and solutions.

Vahid has nearly 30 years of experience in technology and business leadership. Joining Lam in 1995, he was previously the senior vice president and general manager of the company’s Etch Business Unit, where he was responsible for the launch of Sense.i^®, Lam’s most innovative etch platform to date. Prior to that, he held a range of leadership positions at the company, supporting product management and marketing for the Etch Business Unit, as well as overseeing development of Lam’s dielectric etch, conductor and 3DIC etch innovations.

Vahid earned his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.