AI-Fueled Startups

Who We Are

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  Jacob Colker

  Managing Director
  Jacob Colker is an early-stage startup leader with 10+ years of experience as CEO, GM, CMO, and 2x founder. He teaches entrepreneurship at the University of Washington Foster Business School and is an active angel investor, mentor, and advisor in the Pacific Northwest. Jacob was formerly a political campaign operative with the Democratic Party.​​
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  Vu Ha

  Technical Director
  Vu Ha is a technologist with 20+ years of experience building products at some of the largest companies in the world. Most notably, Vu led applied research and engineering teams at Microsoft's AdCenter Labs and Bing. He co-founded SemanticScholar.org and led its development through its first public launch. Vu holds a Ph.D. in AI from the University of Wisconsin.
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  Oren Etzioni

  CEO of Allen Institute for AI
  Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer at AI2. He has been a Professor at the University of Washington's Computer Science department since 1991. His awards include Seattle's Geek of the Year (2013), and he has founded or co-founded several companies, including Farecast and Decide. He has written over 100 technical papers, as well as commentary on AI for The New York Times and Nature. He helped to pioneer meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and Open Information Extraction.
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  James Allard

  COO of Allen Institute for AI
  James Allard is the COO at AI2. James specializes in Operations and Finance and has had founder or leadership roles in organizations ranging from a large multi-national software company to start-ups in various industries. James continues to focus on operational excellence and financial efficiency at AI2, and works to build a culture that will allow AI2 to achieve all of its goals relating to AI for the common good. James has an MBA and a JD and was a corporate and international trade attorney in his early career.
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  Lauren Krainski

  Incubator Team
  Lauren has eight years of technical, strategy, and marketing consulting experience working for Deloitte Consulting, Alcoa, and a Seattle-based SaaS startup advisory firm. Lauren is currently completing her MBA at the UW Foster School of Business, where she is concentrating on Entrepreneurship and Analytics. Lauren also holds both an Economics degree and a Marketing degree from the University of Pittsburgh.
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  Gaurav Oberoi

  Entrepreneur in Residence
  Gaurav Oberoi is widely-respected amongst many Seattle entrepreneurs. He was the founder of BillMonk (acquired by Obopay), the founder of Precision Polling (acquired by Survey Monkey), and is also an active angel investor in Estately, Glowforge, Paperflip, and more.
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  Kirby Winfield

  Investor in Residence
  Kirby Winfield is one of the most seasoned startup operators and angel investors in Seattle. He was a founding team member and operating executive at back-to-back tech IPOs, with Go2Net (GNET) and Marchex (MCHX). He also has two more exits as operating CEO, with AdXpose (acquired by comScore) and Dwellable (acquired by HomeAway). Additionally, Kirby is an angel investor in over 20 companies.
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  Alessya Labzhinova

  CTO in Residence
  Alessya Labzhinova studied Applied Math and Russian Literature at the University of Washington as an undergrad. For the past nine years she worked as a Software Engineer and Program Manager at Amazon building forecasting platforms, data science tools and solving latency problems on a massive scale. Her interests lie in data science platforms, reproducible research, forecasting methods, and education technology entrepreneurship.
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  James Baird

  CTO in Residence
  James Baird studied Computer Science and English Literature at Western Washington University. He has eleven years of experience as a software engineer, and has built frontend systems, backend systems, and mobile apps for a variety of companies in the Seattle area.
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  Michael Petrochuk

  CTO in Residence
  Michael Petrochuk graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor from the Computer Science department. He founded a Nonprofit organization, Husky Nation, that received the world record title of Largest Exercise Ball Class with 450 people. He received several awards including TigerLaunch Semi-Finalist, Dubhacks 1st Place, and Sears Independent Track Grand Prize. Michael interned at Google, Uber, Lattice (acquired by Apple), Stylyze, and vCita as machine learning engineer and full-stack developer.
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  Stewart Fortier

  CTO in Residence
  Stewart Fortier is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He served as the co-founder & CTO at MassRoots (now a public company) and has invested in or advised over a dozen startups, primarily in the Seattle and Bay areas. He has built and led world-class engineering teams from the first line of code through a successful exit.
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  Matt Hocking

  Entrepreneur in Residence
  Matt is an experienced product designer excited by building businesses and products that solve real problems for everyday people. He co-founded moving startup Ghostruck, was an early member of product teams at MeetMoi (acquired by Match.com) and Chime, and has consulted on design and experience for Uber, WeWork, Microsoft, T-Mobile, DocuSign, OfferUp, Regalii and Appuri (Acquired by Docusign). Matt has also lectured on design internationally at General Assembly and the Shillington School of Design.
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  Kohen Chia

  CTO in Residence
  Kohen Chia has over ten years of experience building consumer products at Expedia and Zillow, where he led several engineering, big data, and machine learning teams. He founded the team behind Zillow's video walkthrough and 3D virtual tour products, and is passionate about building experiences that inspire people. Kohen holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Washington.