Chief Commercial Officer and Co-Founder

Email: brian.steel@hypatiaproject.com

Brian Steel is Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Hypatia. He is responsible for Hypatia’s strategic partnerships and innovation pipeline. Brian has 30 years of executive and board-level roles, from venture-backed technology start-ups to public corporations. He specializes in commercializing information technologies and cleantech, with successful IPOs, exits and international growth in search, advertising, media and cloud AI.

In the information technology sector, Brian has led international scale-outs for D2C and B2B platforms that leverage advanced data engineering and artificial intelligence for consumer personalization, advertising optimization and online search, from Pandora to Yahoo!. He currently leads Hypatia’s Joint Venture Partnership Program with the U.S. Department of Commerce National Technical Information Service (NTIS) for data innovation, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. In the clean technology sector, Brian has worked directly on the commercialization of more than 45 leading-edge ventures within an innovation ecosystem that includes Fortune 500, leading universities, entrepreneurs and national labs of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), to include the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Legacy of Building and Scaling Innovative Technologies

• Served as President, International, at Yahoo!, responsible for the search marketing business outside the U.S., including building an 800-person global organization generating $1.5 billion in annual revenue (data engineering and algorithm-based online search)

• Served as board member and Executive Chairman of Pandora Media International, the Internet streaming music leader, for eight years through its $2.6 billion IPO (data engineering and artificial intelligence for D2C music personalization and streaming)

• Served as President and CEO of VoloMedia, the leading advertising and reporting platform for portable media (data engineering for data-in-flight with algorithms for advertising optimization)

• Served as board member for more than 20 early-stage IT companies, involving in dozens of venture capital financing transactions, while serving as President and CEO of Idealab Silicon Valley

Active Leadership in Industry and Educational Organizations

• Co-Founder of Cleantech-to-Market Program, Berkeley Haas School of Business

• Board of Directors, The Nysmith School

Education

• Duke University, B.S., Economics, Angier B. Duke Scholar

• Berkeley Haas, Faculty, Director of Economic Analysis and Policy