Derek Proudian

Derek Proudian is a Silicon Valley venture investor, start-up CEO, and entrepreneur.

He has served as the CEO of six venture-capital backed companies, including Zip2 (Elon Musk’s first company, which he sold to Compaq for over $300 million). Mr. Proudian has worked as a general partner at the venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), a venture partner at Morgan Stanley Ventures, and as an R&D manager at Hewlett-Packard Labs. As a general partner at MDV he was part of a team credited with delivering $3.5 billion in returns to limited partners from an initial $225 million investment.

As a founding board member, Mr. Proudian has helped shepherd a number of companies to successful exits, including: mSpot, which was sold to Samsung in 2012 for $50 million; Daintree Networks, which was sold to General Electric in 2016 for $100 million; SquareTrade, which was sold to Allstate in January 2017 for $1.4 billion; and Newtrax Technologies, which was sold to Sandvik AB in June 2019 for $70 million.

He received a BS in Cognitive Science, a BA in Creative Writing, an MS in Computer Science, and an MBA from Stanford University.