About

Andrea Denaro

Andrea is an enthusiastic digital entrepreneur and has built and led one of the leading global digital marketing agencies. A serial entrepreneur with deep experience in digital marketing across a spectrum of industries, he is a company builder. As a proven marketer, Andrea brings thoughtful digital strategy, profound understanding of effective and monetizable digital presence and decades of precious branding and demand generation knowhow to build our entire brand experience.

Ken Kisner

Ken Kisner started in Graphic arts in 1992 creating clear coats and coatings for the outdoor advertising industry. Ken along with his Brother Brad founded Triangle Digital LLC in 2001 focusing on growing the inkjet business globally. They established Inkjet manufacturing in California & China, and a sales office in Luxembourg Europe. Triangle Digital became a global leader in wide format and grant format graphic arts gaining nearly 22% global market share of the billboard business by 2005 and selling 1.6 million kilograms a year of inkjet inks and coatings. Ken and Brad sold Triangle Digital to INX/Sakata in 2006 where they continued in leadership roles for the Digital Division. In 2009 Ken became the President/CTO/COO of INX Digital overseeing all aspects of the business including manufacturing in Guangzhou China, Prague Czech Republic and Dixon CA. He additionally managed Global Sales with nearly 100 distributors and dealers and research and development. Ken has become fluent in business start-up, acquisition, management, international operations, international research and development, and international administration.

Ken founded Molecule Corp in 2014 as a uniquely creative, data-driven enterprise focusing on discovery and product innovation in industrial inkjet markets and 3D printing materials. In 2017 Ken and a partner Nick Talken Founded the Albert Software Platform, a chemical formulating software which allows Molecule to rapidly complete tasks and collect clean, normalized data. In May of 2019 Molecule Corp was Acquired by Henkel Corporation. Ken became the Head of Innovation and quickly set the new global strategy for the 108 person Additive Manufacturing group.

On May 1, 2021 Ken left the 3D printing team and took a new position as Global Head of Digital Innovation at Henkel. He is currently overseeing the Digital Transformation of the 2500 global Scientific community at Henkel. Within less than a year we will be collecting over 1 million clean and structured data points per month. With our more than 50 data scientists and programmers we are changing the way the chemical industry will function in the future.

Jeff Holden

Jeff Holden served as Uber’s chief product officer from 2014 to 2018 where he founded the group that developed Uber’s self-driving technology, led the development of Uber Eats from its inception, spearheaded the Uber Elevate urban air transportation initiative and created Uber’s AI Labs. Jeff also held various leadership positions at Amazon for nearly ten years, working closely with founder Jeff Bezos before the company was even founded, leading to his role as SVP of worldwide consumer applications.

Having led the development of Amazon Prime, Holden was also responsible for the company’s worldwide consumer website experience, including personalization, ordering, community, search, automated merchandising and online traffic. He is the founder of Atomic Machines, a new venture focused on atomically precise manufacturing. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991 with a BS and MS in computer science.

Yori Nelken

Yori is a serial entrepreneur and investor with over 18 years of leadership experience driving startup companies from concept to success. With his deep experience in the trenches building multiple businesses from the ground up and through their exits, Yori has emerged a highly sought-after CEO coach, mentor, advisor and investor.

8200 alumni, Yori was the founder and CEO of Banter, a pioneering natural language processing company. He successfully established the company as a leader in the call-center space, serving some of the largest US banks (including Wells Fargo and Bank of America), until its acquisition by IBM. After selling Banter in 2004, Yori joined the Mayfield Fund in Silicon Valley as entrepreneur-in-residence, where he provided deal flow and due-diligence support as well as portfolio mentoring. In 2005, Yori founded TimeBridge, a pre-cloud calendar management assistant, an early example of successful viral promotion within a corporate setting. With a corporate user base of millions of users, TimeBridge was acquired by MerchantCircle.

Yori also co-founded Local Sciences, a local data-as-a-service provider, successfully engineering its pivot to become a broad data collection and analysis technology. Local Sciences quickly became the largest accurate local database for service businesses in the Health & Beauty and Automotive verticals, providing data to YP, Groupon and other industry leaders. Yori returned to Israel and joined Cognitiv Ventures after living in the Bay Area for 14 years.

Jim Sledzik

Jim Sledzik is Managing Director, North America, for the strategic venturing program of Aramco Ventures. The mission of this program is to invest globally in start-up and high growth companies with technologies of strategic importance to Aramco and to accelerate their development and deployment in Aramco’s operations. The $1.5 billion Sustainability Fund supports Aramco’s ambitions to achieve net-zero Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions across its wholly-owned operated assets by 2050, development of new lower-carbon fuels businesses, and furthering Aramco’s broader environmental objectives. The $500 million Digital / Industrial Fund is focused on digital and industrial technologies that can add value to Aramco’s operations.

With more than 35 years of experience in the energy industry, including 15 years in venture capital and private equity investing, Jim joined Aramco Ventures in October 2018. He heads the North America region and is responsible for overseeing existing investments and growing Aramco Ventures’ investment portfolio.

Prior to Aramco, Sledzik served as Managing Director at Hall Labs, known for innovation in areas ranging from sustainability to personal transportation. Sledzik was Senior Partner and President of North America for EV Private Equity from 2008 to 2017, managing five funds targeting technology-driven, high-growth potential companies in the upstream oil and gas sector. His career spans a wide range of marketing and technology roles in Schlumberger (SLB), including Global Account Director at SLB and WesternGeco’s Global Marketing & New Technology Director and Vice President of Multi Client Services. Sledzik earned a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh and a bachelor’s degree in geosciences from Pennsylvania State University. He is a member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) and serves on the advisory boards for the Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University and the Ion in Houston, TX, and the Industry Leadership Council of Greentown Labs.