forward-deployed-engineer
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Jerod Nelsen
Jerod Nelsen is a forward-deployed engineer and deployment strategist working out of the Office of the CEO at Peregrine, the San Francisco data platform that Sequoia valued at $2.5 billion for untangling the disparate systems public safety agencies rely on. A 6'7" former Princeton volleyball captain who studied Operations Research and Financial Engineering, he graduated summa cum laude in 2022, added a master's from Penn in 2024, and passed through EY-Parthenon and Audax before landing at one of the fastest-scaling govtech companies in the country. He sits where the code meets the customer: turning tangled agency data into something an analyst can actually search.
Erin Price-Wright
Erin Price-Wright is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the firm's American Dynamism practice alongside Katherine Boyle. Focused on AI for the physical world, she backs early-stage companies in robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, and critical minerals. A Stanford and Oxford-trained mathematician who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, she spent most of her pre-investing career at Palantir - starting as a Forward Deployed Engineer and rising to Head of Product for its data analytics platform - before becoming a partner at Index Ventures. She joined a16z in April 2024 to focus on the energy and industrial AI side of America's technological renaissance.