Ed Roman

I'm a professional investor focusing on enterprise SaaS, marketplaces, and software infrastructure. I manage a venture capital firm named Hack VC, focused on investing in early-stage startups. I also lead the Hack VC syndicate on AngelList.

Most recently, I led innovation for Pluralsight, which is democratizing professional learning. Pluralsight acquired HackHands, where I was recently CEO. HackHands is a marketplace of developers that accelerates developer productivity via realtime mentoring. I served as a board observer of Pluralsight for years.

I'm founder of hack.summit(), the largest programmer conference (and the largest virtual conference) in history with 80k+ attendees. I spearheaded a "Medium.com for developers" project as well.

Prior to this, I was founder & CEO of Ghostfire Games.Our game Rage of the Gladiator won critical acclaim as a top-rated Wii title. It's available on Nintendo 3DS, Android, and won a game-of-the-year award for iPhone/iPad.

I created the world's largest Java community (450k members), TheServerSide (acquired by Precise Software), and wrote a best-selling book on Java, Mastering EJB.