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Two Types of Full Stack Machine Learning Engineering
Talks about Machine Learning, Full Stack Engineer and Startup
IZ
Ivan Zhou
Partner at Accel
San Francisco, California
Overview
Ivan Zhou is a Partner at Accel in San Francisco, California, with a background in molecular biology and business from the University of California, Berkeley. He has made significant contributions to the tech industry through roles such as Director of Product Management at Niantic, CEO and Co-founder of Mayhem, and CEO and Co-Founder of Comet Home. He specializes in investing in Seed and Series A stages in sectors like Cloud Infrastructure, AI, SaaS, and Consumer Internet, with notable investments in companies like Decagon.
Work Experience
Partner
2024 - Current
Leading seed and series A investments in product-oriented, early-stage teams focused on building consumer and enterprise applications.
Accel is an seed and growth-stage venture capital firm that helps a global community of entrepreneurs.
Board Member
2024
Decagon is a software development company that develops customer support software enabling businesses to improve their customer services.
Raised $100,000,000.00 from A* Capital, Bond, Bain Capital Ventures, ACME Capital, Accel and Elad Gil.
Advisor
2022
Copilot provides easy screen sharing and remote assistance software for companies, IT departments, and personal tech support.
Advisor & Angel Investor
2018 - 2024
Supporting founders and their companies at the earliest stages. Like to be the first check in when possible. Investor in AfterHour, Alt, Beacons.ai, Bento, Bokksu, BuildSpace, Campfire, Captain.tv, Coinbooks, Coinshift, Copilot, Curiosity Research, Dang Foods, Decagon AI, Eclipse Labs, Elsewhere, Encuadrado, Fal.ai, Fast Break Labs, Infina, IronPlans (Acq. Silo), Jo, Karat, Kino, Landed, Paper.xyz, Lowkey (Acq. Niantic), LiquiFi, Ludio, Magic.link, Maverick, Mojo, Moonpay, Neverland, Ninja Delivery, Pahdo Labs, Peak, Ping.gg, Playbook, Poparazzi, Prune, Quanta, Rascal Games, Rex, Rize Labs, Roame, Scapin' Labs, Savvy, Series Financial, Sherlock, Syndicate, Uberduck, Winter, and more. LP in Afore Capital, Exponent, Hyphen Capital, Slope.agency, Weekend Fund and more.
Advisor
2023 - 2024
Trace is a software platform that automatically edits and delivers personalized moments for each player.
Raised $68,000,000.00 from Lakestar, NextGen Venture Partners, Pelion Venture Partners and Toba Capital.
Director of Product Management
2020 - 2024
Joined Niantic in December 2020 with the acquisition of my company, Mayhem. Led the product organization responsible for empowering our developers to create world class AR experiences and helping our community discover and engage with the ecosystem of Niantic content. My groups include our Game Platform, Shared Platform Services, Data (ML & data engineering), and Social product areas at Niantic. I also work closely with our Niantic Ventures and Corporate Development team to identify and champion strategic partnerships, investments, and acquisitions.
Niantic develops reality platforms that focus on mapping and security for current and future AR hardware generations.
Raised $770,000,000.00 from ID8 Investments, Pure Imagination Brands and Coatue.
CEO and Co-founder
2017 - 2020
Built real-time products for millions of everyday gamers. Acquired by Niantic in 2020 Raised $5.7M from Accel, Y Combinator (W18), Afore Capital, Nextgen Venture Partners, Kevin Lin, Paul Buchheit, Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, and others.
Mayhem brings together gamers through live, interactive experiences.
Raised $5,700,000.00 from Jeffrey Rosen, Afore Capital, Y Combinator, NextGen Venture Partners, Kevin Lin, South Park Commons, John Graham, Paul Levine, Paul Buchheit and Accel.
Venture Partner
2017 - 2020
NextGen Venture Partners is a network-driven venture firm that brings together hundreds of part-time venture capitalists who invest in and support our portfolio of exceptional entrepreneurs
NextGen Venture Partners invests in seed-stage companies with the participation of their venture partners.
CEO and Co-Founder
2015 - 2017
Co-founded one of the earliest companies to offer on-demand, home sharing insurance with members in over 30 states across the US. Bootstrapped and scaled the company to over six figures in revenue before selling a majority stake in 2017.
Analyst
2015 - 2016
Investing in TMT companies @ multi-billion dollar, fundamental long/short equity hedge fund Focused on hardtech: AI/ML, autonomy, hyperscale datacenters, semi/semicap, smartphone supply chain, enterprise HW, communication equipment, alternative energy.