Will Little
Managing Director at Prota Ventures
Will Little
Managing Director at Prota Ventures
Greater Seattle Area
Overview
Work Experience
Managing Director
2016 - Current
We promote human flourishing by investing holistically in entrepreneurs. Learn more at https://www.protaventures.com On the personal front, in the early 2000s I learned how to write code, build scalable web applications, and founded both a web hosting company and a digital marketing company. After a couple of small exits at the end of the 2000s, I helped start new ventures (both digital and brick-and-mortar), including a couple schools, a coffee shop, and ultimately a "venture-studio / VC" hybrid organization that my partners and I now call Prota.
Co-Founder
2023
Ai Layer Labs is building 6079's Gamified Proof of Inference Protocol. Learn more at https://6079.ai
Board Chair
2023
Impact Stream has built a progressive web app to enable local people to propose and solve local problems. Our pilot in West Africa (Togo) is deploying ~$60k to fund six projects. Learn more (and see photos) at https://impact.stream Under the hood, the web app uses blockchain tech (EVM) to record the quadratic voting of the local people. Blockchain is also used to move funds from impactstream.eth, to togo.impactstream.eth, to offramp into the local CFA currency. The idea here is that this open-source technology can be used by NGOs (or anyone) to better help identify and solve holistic development needs (e.g. poverty alleviation).
Board Member
2010
REST = Real Escape from the Sex Trade. REST offers pathways to freedom, safety, and hope to individuals who have experienced the sex trade.. Everyone deserves to be loved. Everyone deserves a life free from exploitation. I first met Amanda (the Executive Director) in the late 2000s. At that time she was doing incredible work building relationships to help people in need on the streets of Seattle, but she (understandably) wanted to do more. We pulled together a team, found an amazing Board Chair (Brent Turner), formed a non-profit, and got after it. I've had the privilege of seeing REST grow to the point where we work closely with law enforcement to provide emergency sheltering, restorative housing, and job training to help those afflicted get back on their feet. We're now at the point where we see *every month* a human being leave "the life" permanently. (!!!) There is still a TON of work to do. Most people don't realize that this modern form of slavery is very much active around the world. The stories are heartbreaking. Please take the time to learn more about REST at https://iwantrest.com/ and reach out to help. I'd love to talk with you about it.
Co-Founder & CEO/CTO
2013 - 2016
I had the fortunate experience of helping build, scale, and invest in this school where I got to see dramatic life-change happen on a weekly basis. People leveled-up their skills to gain employment; often doubling or tripling their previous salaries after an 8-week bootcamp. Lean more about the school at https://www.codefellows.org
Founder & CEO
2005 - 2013
Living in Switzerland and then back in the US, this was a period of my life when I ran a marketing company that built "long-tail SEO" sites, did rigorous A/B testing, and engaged in lead-gen/affiliate marketing to monetize our web properties. We conducted ourselves in a manner (and built products in such a way) that was engaging and *actually helpful* for users (i.e. white-hat; I followed the SEO community closely and realized giving Google what it wanted was the best long-term strategy). In the early 2010s we then turned into an investment group and early form of a venture studio, helping others build companies and investing capital to propel them into new markets, build new products, etc... This became the foundation for what is now Prota Ventures.
Co-Founder & Proprietor
2009 - 2012
Neighborhood coffee shop in Seattle's Central District. The process of choosing a roaster/supplier, menu, distributor, serving beer/wine, etc... was an amazing learning experience. Prior to this I had only run digital/online businesses, so jumping through all the hoops from the permitting, build-out, interior design, etc... to ensuring customers had an amazing experience (e.g. we served waffles, :) ) gave me a profound appreciation for the amount of work it takes to run a cafe like this. Thankfully, I had an amazing team. We were able to use the cafe to host meetups and engage with tons of different groups (e.g. early web3 community). I started teaching software development out of the cafe and focused on empowering technical co-founders of startups (this led to Code Fellows being a natural fit as a next step). We ended up donating the cafe to a local non-profit that provided job training skills to people in the neighborhood. They then handed the cafe over to Isolynn “Ice” Dean. It's a great story --> https://www.seattleglobalist.com/2015/04/08/cortona-cafe-central-district-seattle-gentrification-coffee-shop-airbnb/34742
Founder & CEO
2005 - 2010
In the early days of Ruby on Rails (a web development framework), as engineers were "checking it out" and trying to find suitable hosting solutions, it was common to crash shared-server hosts with custom Ruby installs and be (understandably) frustrated with the experience. The market clearly needed a host that tailored to Rails developers. In this "pre-cloud" world, I spun up offerings for shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers, including "pay as you go" services based on memory usage. Because I was (and still am) a Rails developer myself, I was able to serve customers well and empathize with them, help them with code, make gem decisions, optimize memory usage to save them money, etc... which turned out to be very helpful for word-of-mouth growth. The company raised seed money, grew quickly, and got acquired in 2010.
Bioengineer
2004 - 2007
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Little+WC+Vogel+V I have three older brothers who encouraged me - as I was considering what to do in college - to aim for an engineering degree (of any kind). The basic thought there was I could learn Liberal Arts on the side (to be "well-rounded", of course), but an engineering degree had significantly higher market value. :) I've always appreciated that advice. So, indeed, I took my love for biology and wondered into a nanotechnology lab at the University of Washington and learned everything I could from the grad students there. The Bioengineering Department at that point only had a graduate program, but there was a small, stubborn set of us undergrads that wanted to hang out in BioE so they let us in, giving us "Interdisciplinary Engineering" bachelors degrees until we went off to medical school or got MS/PhDs from them. I ended up getting my Masters in Bioengineering there and followed my advisor to Zurich to finish my PhD. For the better part of a decade, as an undergraduate and graduate student, I researched a connective tissue protein called Fibronectin. It circulates around in our blood serum (in soluble form) until it's woven by cells into our Extracellular Matrix (ECM) when tissue growth & regeneration is needed. In it's insoluble, fibrillar form in the ECM, Fibronectin serves a variety of important biophysical functions. I focused on an area of science called Mechanotransduction, which, as Wikipedia will correctly tell you, "refers to the many mechanisms by which cells convert mechanical stimulus into chemical activity." In my case, I worked a ton with Fibroblast cells in tissue culture and researched how they used mechanical force to pull on Fibronectin to do things like reveal cryptic binding sites. Other cells see these new binding sites, bind to them, and activate signaling pathways. Published papers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Little+WC+Vogel+V