I met Ian while we were both working on the advisory board to launch the Angel Capital Association. He is the leader of the fabulously successful, Band of Angels, Silicon Valley’s oldest seed funding organization. Harvard Business School even wrote a case about them.

Dr. Ian Patrick Sobieski is a founding general partner of the Band of Angels Fund, L.P. a $50M venture fund raised in 1999 exclusively from major institutions. Ian has managed more than 40 direct investments totaling $30M, has served on fourteen boards of directors, and currently serves on three. Four of his seed investments have exited for a gain via M&A, a fourth went public in 2003 and a fifth went public in Nov. 2004. Since, August of 1997 Ian has co-directed the Band of Angels: an exclusive group of high-net worth individuals who were former officers or founders of many of the high technology companies that have made Silicon Valley famous. In his ten years coordinating the Band, the organization doubled in size to more than 120 members and invested $100M into more than 150 startup companies. Seven of these companies have gone public and more than thirty have been acquired for a profit to investors. Immediately prior to joining the Band, Ian served as an executive and Director at internet start-up Evite.com and in engineering positions at medical device company Enact Health Management and Kaman Aerospace. Dr. Sobieski has an aerospace engineering Ph.D. and M.S. from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Virginia Tech. Ian is Vice-Chairman of the Angel Capital Association and is a member of the Young Venture Capitalists Association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the National Ski Patrol. He is the author of a dozen technical publications and is a lecturer in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California at Berkeley.