We are delighted to have Ryan McIntyre and Jason Mendelson, both Managing Directors of Foundry Group. Both are veteran investors and both have played multitude of roles in the world of Entrepreneurship, Startups and Investing. What is interesting to note about both of them is that they are not natives of Boulder Colorado. Ryan used to live in the Bay Area and Jason is from Detroit. They moved to Boulder and have played a role in development of that region into a Startup Vortex. In addition to that Jason is helping transform Detroit into a Startup region after the financial crisis of 2008. It is great to have them for Startup Iceland 2013. Both are talented musicians, here is a trailer for a concert that was organized during a VC meetup featuring Jason.

Here is a video of Ryan talking about how he became a Entrepreneur and Founder of Excite, one of the first search engines.

And who can forget the video of “I’m a VC” written, produced and performed by Jason Mendelson.

Ryan McIntyre

During his two decades in the technology industry, Ryan has been a software engineer, entrepreneur, angel investor and venture capitalist.

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Ryan is passionate about helping entrepreneurs build great companies that can move markets, and is fortunate to have worked with start-ups from the dudes-in-a-garage stage to the public-company stage.

Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Ryan started his career in venture capital at Mobius Venture Capital in January 2000.  While at Mobius Venture Capital, Ryan led the firm’s investments in Postini (acq. GOOG) and Sling Media (acq. DISH).

Prior to joining Mobius Venture Capital, Ryan co-founded Excite in 1993, which went public in 1996 and later became Excite@Home following the $6.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home in 1999. At the time this acquisition was the largest internet transaction to date and created a company that achieved peak revenues of $616 million in 2000. There Ryan held the role of Principal Engineer and was a key technological contributor to the company’s search engine and content management systems and also led the design and implementation of Excite’s community and commerce platforms. Ryan was also responsible for integrating engineering teams and technologies into Excite’s infrastructure following the acquisitions of several companies based in Seattle and Austin.

Prior to Excite, Ryan was a member of the technical staff for the Hewlett Packard Division at Oracle Corporation, where he worked on several releases of the Oracle Office platform. Before joining Oracle, Ryan was a software engineer at Canon Research of America, where he focused on the development of optical character recognition algorithms.

Jason MendelsenMendelson-2013-8637-Web1

Jason’s career in venture capital and technology includes a multitude of investing, operational and engineering roles.Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Jason was a software engineer and attorney deeply engaged in the startup ecosystem. Today, he enjoys leveraging his past experiences to partner with entrepreneurs to build great companies.

Jason has over 15 years of experience in the venture capital and technology industries in a multitude of investing, operational and engineering roles. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Jason was a Managing Director and General Counsel for Mobius Venture Capital, where he also acted as its chief administrative partner overseeing all operations of the firm.

During his venture career Jason has been actively involved in serving on boards of portfolio companies and the negotiations and structuring of financings, mergers and exits in the portfolio.

Prior to his involvement with Mobius Venture Capital, Jason was an attorney with Cooley LLP, where he practiced corporate and securities law with an emphasis on representation of emerging companies in private and public financings, mergers and acquisitions. As an attorney, Jason has consummated over $2 billion of venture capital investments, $5 billion in mergers and has extensive experience in fund formation, employment law and general litigation, serving as an expert witness in these related fields.

Before his legal career, Jason was a senior consultant and software engineer at Accenture where he focused on financial institution re-engineering engagements. While at Accenture, Jason supervised programming teams up to forty people in size and was responsible for managing deliverables in multi-billion dollar engagements.

As one of the first full-time, in-house general counsels at a venture capital firm, Jason has been on the forefront of thought leadership and has co-chaired the National Venture Capital Association’s General Counsel group and has been an active participant on the NVCA’s Chief Financial Officer group. He was one of the key draftspersons for the NVCA model document task force which created the industry’s first set of standardized venture capital financing documents, which has greatly aided in the efficiency of completing these types of deals. He currently sits on the board of the NVCA.

Jason holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, with distinction and a Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from the University of Michigan. Jason is an executive board member at NVCA. He is an active musician playing drums and bass guitar in several bands (including Soul Patch and Legitimate Front with his partner Ryan McIntyre) and enjoys home remodeling and travel. Jason was chosen as one of Denver’s 40 under 40. in business in 2009. Jason blogs about his experiences in the venture industry on his blog Mendelson’s Musings and www.askthevc.com and co-authored the best selling book Venture Deals – be smarter than your lawyer and your venture capitalist.

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