Blog

Team Category: Venture Network

Michael Zheng

Michael is a Venture Partner at F-Prime focusing on FinTech and Saas companies. Previously, Michael was the 1st Finance & Ops hire at multiple venture backed SaaS startups (Affinity, Drawbridge) who built high performing Strategy, Finance, and Ops functions while raising $200M+ from leading venture firms. Earlier in his career, he helped found Fluid Financial, an on-demand invoice financing and cash flow management platform.

In recent years, Michael has leveraged his experience & expertise to serve as Advisor and Investor for numerous early stage startups.

Michael is a resident of Oakland and holds an B.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley.

John Shiver, Ph.D.

Dr. John Shiver is a Special Advisor for F-Prime and is also Chief Strategy Officer at IGM ID a wholly owned subsidiary of IGM Biosciences. Established in 2021, IGM ID utilizes a proprietary IgM platform to treat and prevent infectious diseases. The potential utility of this platform for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases is supported by its recent application towards COVID-19 (Ku et al., Nature, published online 03 June 2021).

Prior to joining IGM ID, John was the SVP and Global Head of Vaccines R&D and a member of the Executive Leadership team for 8 years at Sanofi Pasteur, the largest company in the world devoted entirely to vaccines. He previously spent 22 years at Merck & CO where he held a series of senior leadership positions with his last position being VP and Head of Vaccines and Biologics Research. He was a member of Merck Vaccines Integrated Leadership Team and the Global Research Leadership Committee responsible for vaccine research, vaccine clinical assays and biomarkers, and biologics research, and siRNA technologies. Earlier in his career John spent five years at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.

John is a recognized expert and industry leader in vaccine and pharmaceutical research and development. He has guided numerous scientific teams that created novel vaccine and monoclonal antibody candidates to prevent or treat more than 40 infectious and non-infectious diseases, including HIV, influenza, HPV, RSV, CMV, pneumococcus, cancer, and asthma. He has collaborated with other senior leaders to secure the licensure of 14 pharmaceutical products spanning both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, many of which were first- and/or best-in-class products addressing global infectious diseases. He also championed four acquisitions and three major collaborations to obtain new technologies or clinical candidates/products.

John is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the International Society of Vaccines (ISV) and a member of multiple advisory boards, including the Board of Directors for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), Board of Directors for Icosavax, and previously, the Executive Board of the International Society for Vaccines. He has also served on journal editorial boards, including Nature Partner Journals Vaccines and the Journal of Virology. He is the author of more than 150 articles, including 19 in Science, Nature, Cell, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of 68 awarded patents. In addition, he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania College of Medicine and has been recognized by the Financial Times.

John holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biophysics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and Mathematics from Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.

Hannah Arnold

Hannah is a Venture Partner at F-Prime and leads Business Development and Mortgage at Argyle. Previously she was on F-Prime’s tech investment team focused on early-stage FinTech investments. Prior to joining F-Prime, Hannah worked closely with startups in Johannesburg as an associate with Secha Capital, where she spent every day on the ground helping teams in Secha’s portfolio scale. She was a consultant with Bain & Company in Atlanta, where she served large tech clients and worked extensively with the Private Equity practice on deals spanning healthcare, e-commerce and industrials. She began her career working for non-profits in international development, where she saw firsthand the impact that innovative financial products can have on people’s lives. Hannah received her BA in Public Policy from Duke University.

M. Jackson Wilkinson

Jackson Wilkinson is a Venture and Operating Partner with F-Prime, based in the Cambridge office. Jackson supports and advises early-stage healthcare and technology portfolio companies, getting hands-on to help accelerate early product, design, and engineering efforts.

Jackson has led product development at a variety of software companies. Most recently, he was Chief Technology Officer of Project Beacon COVID-19, rapidly expanding access to testing during the pandemic. Previously, he was Senior Vice President at PathAI and led product, design, and engineering, helping grow the company and its technology platform from seed stage through its Series B. Jackson was co-founder and CTO of Kinsights, and following its acquisition, led product and design as part of the management team at Care.com. Prior to his work in digital health and health tech, Jackson led design and UX efforts at consumer technology companies including Posterous (acquired by Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Jackson is a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he holds a degree cum laude in Music and Philosophy.

Harlan Krumholz, M.D.

Harlan Krumholz joined F-Prime in August 2020 as a Venture Partner and is focused on transformative approaches to improve the delivery of care, conduct of research, and empowerment of people in their health decisions – and measures success by the positive, tangible effect on people’s lives. He believes in medicine as an information science and wants to advance approaches that make health care more effective, patient-centric, precise, convenient, equitable, efficient, and to position health care to be smarter with every interaction. He is the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine at Yale University and the founding Director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, one of the nation’s first and most distinguished groups focusing on using applied science to improve health and healthcare. He is also a founder of two companies and an advisor for many others.

Harlan received his BS from Yale College, his MD from Harvard Medical School, and an SM from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Amber Cai, Ph.D.

Amber Cai is a Venture Partner with F-Prime, focusing on early-stage biotechnology investments. She is the founding CEO of Skyline Therapeutics, a leading gene and cell therapy company.

Prior to joining Skyline, Amber was a founding member of Novartis’ R&D Center in China, where she was most recently the Head of Operations and led the Center’s overall business operations overseeing a broad set of functions. During 2005-2006, Amber led the efforts to establish Novartis’ R&D presence in China from the concept stage to implementation. After the Center was established in 2006 as the first fully integrated research and development center in China by multinational pharma companies, she played an instrumental role in recruiting talent, establishing operations, developing Novartis’ China R&D strategy, and building strategic partnerships with government and other external stakeholders and collaborators. Prior to her work in China, Amber was with the Business Development at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Researches in Cambridge, MA.

Amber has decades of experience in science before shifting her career into business. She completed her Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in GPCR signaling and holds an MBA degree from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Muzammil Mansuri, Ph.D.

Muz Mansuri joined F-Prime in January 2020 as a Venture Partner and is based in the Cambridge office. Muz will be working with various F-Prime team members to evaluate therapeutic and digital investment and company creation opportunities. Muz has more than 35 years of experience in various R&D roles as a senior executive within the global biopharmaceutical industry.

Prior to joining F-Prime, Muz was a member of the Executive Committee at Sanofi, as Executive Vice President, Strategy, Business Development, and Licensing.  Among other responsibilities, Muz headed the Strategy, Business Development, Alliance Management and the Venture Group for Sanofi.  Before this, he was at Gilead Sciences as Senior Vice President, Research and Development Strategy and Business Development.  In that capacity he led the R&D Strategy, Business Development, and M&A activities for the company.  Muz has served as Chief Executive Officer of several biotech companies and as a General Partner at Flagship Ventures (now Flagship Pioneering).  He began his career in the pharmaceutical industry as a bench medicinal chemist with Bristol Myers.

Muz received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University College London. He conducted postdoctoral research at UCLA and Columbia University.

 

Tristan Zajonc

Tristan Zajonc is cofounder and CEO of Continual IQ, an enterprise AI startup working to democratize operational AI. Prior to Continual IQ, Tristan was CTO for Machine Learning at Cloudera and led development of Cloudera’s machine learning software offerings. He was previously cofounder and CEO of Sense, an enterprise data science platform that was acquired by Cloudera in 2016. He has over 15 years’ experience in applied data science, machine learning, and machine learning systems development across academia and industry and holds a PhD from Harvard University.

Steve Schultz

Steve is a Venture Partner at F-Prime focusing on financial services and technology companies. Previously he served as COO of Check, a mobile payments service, where he led product, strategic partnerships, and merchant go-to-market from its inception through its acquisition by Intuit. Check was one of the fastest growing mobile financial services, acquiring over 10M consumers and processing over $1B in payment volume. Steve began his FinTech career with Yahoo! Finance, the leading destination for financial market news and data, where he held general management and senior product line roles. He began his career in software as a product manager at Epiphany, a pioneering enterprise marketing analytics platform.

Steve advises privately held FinTech companies, including SigFig, Finxera and Capital Preferences. He holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BA in Economics from UC Davis. He lives in Menlo Park, CA.

Sam Bisbee

Sam Bisbee is a Venture Partner at F-Prime with a background in technology, cybersecurity, and operations. He is also the Chief Security Officer at Threat Stack where he’s responsible for the company’s security and compliance programs, in addition to providing security services to Threat Stack’s Cloud SecOps Program customers.

Sam joined Threat Stack in 2014 to build and help bring the product to market. Previously Sam was a member of the Cloudant team (acquired by IBM).