Category: Startups

Yan-David Erlich (“Yanda”) is a Managing Director at Coatue, focused on the early stage venture capital practice (Seed through Series B) and the enterprise software investing practice.

Prior to Coatue, Yanda was a 4-time venture-backed Founder/CEO. Most recently, he founded Parsable, the Connected Worker platform for industrial teams. Parsable counts leading Global Fortune 500 industrials as customers and is backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VCs. Mr. Erlich also founded ChoiceVendor, a B2B services marketplace which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2010. He was also the founder & CEO of Mogad and of Happiness Engines.

Yanda has also been an active early-stage investor and advisor and is among the earliest backers of Mixer Labs (acquired by Twitter), Thumbtack, MasterClass, CircleUp, ApartmentList, and Buddybuild (acquired by Apple). He also helped start Mucker Lab, a venture accelerator in Santa Monica, and has been an EIR at Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Battery Ventures.

Yan-David started his career with software engineering and product management roles at both Google and Microsoft. He has a Bachelor of Science in both Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering from Rice University (Phi Beta Kappa) and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business where he was an Arjay Millar Scholar. Mr. Erlich has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Read his Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/Erlich

Sara Carlstead Brumfield (B.A. ’97) is a co-founder of FromThePage, software that allows volunteers to transcribe written documents online. The open source software is used by libraries, archives, museums and other organizations with historical documents.

Developed by Ben Brumfield (B.A. ’97), her business partner and husband, the software allows their clients to scan in historical manuscripts and make the image available to volunteers who transcribe and index the contents.

She said their business is successful in part because it appeals to people who are already passionate about telling a story. “Transcription is done by volunteers, so that is only going to draw a particular kind of customer. We do it in such a way that you get really immersed in the story, like starting to transcribe a diary and wanting to know what happens next.”

Read her Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/saracarl

Rakesh Agrawal (B.A. ’98) is the Founder and CEO of SnapStream, the company that helps people record a LOT of television and then search inside those recordings for anything… a celebrity, political candidate, research topic, government, country, etc. The product is in use by organizations like the The Daily Show, the New York City Mayor’s office, the U.S. Senate, the White House, The Late Show with Colbert, NBC, CBS, ClearChannel, E! Entertainment, the DNC, Politico, Buzzfeed, MLB Networks and more.

He is also an investor in 80+ startups, including direct investments in Cruise (acquired by GM), LendUp,Wag, Grin, and Remix Software.

CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/rakesh

Jake Rosenberg (B.A. ’02) worked for global and startup technology employers before before launching his own company. He has over twenty years experience developing high-performance, scalable, global-ready web applications used daily by millions of people, and he is committed to improving diversity across the tech industry. He readily shares his CTO and startup expertise with other founders and – as part of the Founders Pledge community – pledged to contribute a substantial portion of his future proceeds to charitable causes.

Read his Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://csweb.rice.edu/jake

 

Gaura Banga (Ph.D. ’98) explored several roles in various technology employers and decided he preferred spending his energy on innovation, building and working with motivated teams to create new solutions, while aligned with investors with similar goals. He has launched three companies: PDAApps (acquired by Intellisync Corp), Bromium, and Balbix.

Read his Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/banga.