Paul Conley

Paul has 15 years of operating experience in technical and management roles. He worked for six years at Los Alamos National Labs where he led doctoral and post-doctoral research projects in the computational modeling of high explosive materials and components. Following his research career he entered the commercial world where he founded two companies. He was the founding CEO of both BrightScale and Appfluent Technology, where he drove strategy, operations and fund raising. Appfluent developed enterprise software for management of high-performance relational databases. BrightScale developed massively parallel multi-core microprocessors for applications in big data analytics and high definition image/video processing.

Since 2007, Paul has been a venture capital investor in early stage technology companies. He began his investing career at Paladin Capital Group, a firm with specialty in security and defense technologies with commercial application. At Paladin, he has invested broadly in enterprise software, semiconductors and life sciences. At Vertical Venture Partners, Paul has particular interest in commercialization of technologies coming out of major research universities.

Paul in an active investor who often leverages operating experience by serving on portfolio company boards. Examples of current Board roles: Twist Bioscience, 10X Genomics, HealthTell, IonPath, Menlo Microsystems.