I am delighted to announce Aziz Gilani, VC and long time friend will join this year’s Startup Iceland VC Panel. Aziz and I used to work at Capgemini Ernst and Young in Houston. We spent countless hours doing performance testing a major enterprise application. I am going to date myself by talking about the things that we had to do to evaluate the performance of a web application but that is not important. What is important is Aziz, kept working on things that really mattered and now runs a very successful venture capital fund in Houston. I am extremely happy that he agreed to come to Iceland and participate in Startup Iceland. He has invited a bunch of his friends to come as well so it should be a great way to connect and build new relationships with a new geography for Iceland.
Here is brief bio of Aziz, I think this description does not do justice to what he has accomplished. Aziz is a leader within the venture community in Texas.
Aziz is a Managing Director at Mercury, where he focuses on investments in enterprise SaaS, Cloud and data science startups. Aziz is a graduate of the Kauffman Fellows Program through the Center for Venture Education, where he completed industry-defining field work on Seed Accelerators. Aziz is a recognized expert in Seed Accelerators and has been quoted in several national publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, ReadWriteWeb, TechCocktail, and The Business Journals. Outside of Mercury, Aziz serves in advisory roles for Knight Foundation, the Mayor of Houston’s Tech and Innovation Council, Seed Accelerator Rankings, and SXSW Interactive. He is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business where he teaches a course on venture capital.
