stanford-engineering
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Robert Jacks
Robert Jacks is President & CEO of Sparrow Pharmaceuticals, a Boston-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing targeted therapies for disorders driven by intracellular cortisol excess. In September 2025 he closed a $95 million Series B co-led by RA Capital and Forbion to advance clofutriben, an HSD-1 inhibitor, through a Phase 2b trial in type 2 diabetes patients with elevated cortisol. A civil engineer turned biotech operator, Jacks has spent 25 years in the industry, co-founded Symbiomix Therapeutics (sold after Solosec NDA approval), previously led Indalo Therapeutics, and has raised more than $300 million across his companies.
Andrew Ekmark
Andrew Ekmark is the CEO and co-founder of Ink'd Greetings, a Phoenix-based startup that builds touchscreen kiosks printing personalized greeting cards on demand in about 30 seconds. He launched the company in 2023 with his wife Sammi after a frustrating last-minute Valentine's Day card hunt at Target, and has since grown the business to kiosks across dozens of states, raising roughly $2.5 million while taking direct aim at the legacy greeting card industry.
Dave Licata
Dave Licata is a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer turned biotech operator who co-founded TORL BioTherapeutics with legendary UCLA oncologist Dennis Slamon. As President and CFO (and founding CEO), he built TORL into a clinical-stage oncology company developing antibody-drug conjugates against targets like Claudin 6 and Claudin 18.2, raising more than $450 million while keeping a reputation for capital efficiency. He is also Executive Chairman of 1200 Pharma and previously founded Holoclara and served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Caltech.
Eric Harber
Eric Harber is the CEO of KUKUI, the SaaS marketing, CRM, and analytics platform built for the automotive aftermarket. A Stanford-trained engineer with a Duke MBA, he has spent more than 25 years building and turning around global software companies - taking Hipcricket public as President and COO, running global product and marketing inside Amazon's Local Commerce group, leading Flowroute as CEO, and advising founders and boards as an Operating Partner at private equity firm Diversis Capital. He coaches high school wrestling and sits on the board of a Seattle-area nonprofit school.
Randy Battat
Randy Battat is the co-founder and CEO of PreVeil, a Boston-based company building end-to-end encrypted email, file sharing and storage for organizations that handle data too sensitive to leave on a server in plaintext. Before betting on cryptography, he ran Airvana through the mobile-broadband boom, spent thirteen years at Apple shipping the PowerBook, and led networking at Motorola. His pitch is deceptively simple: you cannot steal what you cannot see.
Upal Basu
Upal Basu is a General Partner and Managing Member at NGP Capital, a Nokia-backed venture capital firm in Palo Alto. A three-time wave rider of mobile transformation - first as an engineer, then as the founder and CEO of Mformation Technologies (which became the world's largest mobile device management company, managing 500M+ devices before being acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), and now as a lead investor in the 5G and connected enterprise era. With an engineering degree from Imperial College London, an MS from Stanford, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Basu brings a rare blend of operator grit and institutional rigor to backing founders in cybersecurity, AI, autonomous robotics, satellite navigation, and industrial technology.