beth ellyn mcclendon

investor, advisor & product designer

Beth Ellyn McClendon, PhD is a product designer with 11 patents related to navigation, advertising, audience and content targeting. She designed for Netscape and spent 8 years working as a tech lead at Cisco on early access points and wireless network management tools. She was hired by Google to build a WiMAX network and was transferred to grow a user experience team focused on geographic and location-based tools, which came to include Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View and Sketchup. After its acquisition, she worked on monetization and personalization tools for YouTube. In 2009, she joined Android as a product manager for the Nexus One release and was responsible for forward logistics, e-commerce, carrier services integration and device provisioning. She has been investing and advising startups since 2004, and now manages her portfolio at Free State Forge.

brian mcclendon

investor, founder & engineering exec

He was a co-founder and angel investor in Keyhole, Inc., a geospatial data visualization company that was purchased by Google in 2004. Keyhole spun out of another company called Intrinsic Graphics, of which he was also a co-founder. For over 15 years, he worked as a VP of Engineering and GM building Google Maps, Street View, Google Earth and later Uber mapping. In 2013, he was awarded the United Nations “Champions of the Earth” for his work on Google Earth. In 2015, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering for strategic, technical, and managerial leadership resulting in widespread accurate and useful geographic information. He holds over 40 patents and an honorary doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas. Brian is currently a Venture Partner at Up Ventures and an SVP at Niantic Labs where he manages teams in San Francisco, Seattle, London and Lawrence, KS.