Ron is Vice Chair of the Angel Capital Association, North America’s principal organization for
professional angel investors. He is also Chair of the ACA’s education committee and is the
author of the ACA’s official courses on Early-Stage Boards of Directors and of Managing and
Mitigating Angel Investor Risks.
Ron is also Chair of the Software Interest Group at the Band of Angels, Silicon Valley’s oldest
angel group. He has been an active member for the past sixteen years. He invests in AI,
analytics, business software and health IT systems. He spent seventeen years as a partner at
Apax Partners, a global VC/PE firm where he focused on technology investing and cross border
investing across Apax’s investment teams in the US, Europe, the UK and Israel. Between his
overlapping VC and angel careers, he has invested in or advised more than seventy startups and
has served on more than forty boards. Recent exits have included Taulia (invoice arbitrage, sold
to SAP in 2022—sale pending) and Gainsight (customer experience management, sold to Vista
Equity Partners in 2021). Currently, he is also an advisor to Neva SGR, the venture capital arm of
Italy’s largest banking conglomerate, Intesa Sanpaolo.
He has spent the past decade teaching angel best practices to angels and regional and national
governments in startup hubs around the world, including Australia, Armenia, Chile, Georgia,
Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and Ukraine. He writes and speaks frequently about
venture and angel investing, AI investing trends, capital models, and startup hub best practices
as well as lessons the COVID generation can learn from the Black Death’s impact on European
society.
Prior to becoming an early-stage investor, he was Chief Marketing Officer and head of Investor
Relations for Verity, the market leader in corporate information retrieval. During his tenure the
company won Large Cap Turnaround of the Year. Earlier, he was a direct report to Steve Jobs at
NeXT, where he managed global marketing strategy and European marketing. Prior to NeXT he
spent twelve years working for civilian and other federal agencies, concurrent with
professorships and university computing roles at the University of Maryland and Brown
University.
He received his BA, MA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and is a
former Fulbright Scholar (Italy).