Ash Rust
Managing Partner at Sterling Road
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Managing Partner
2017 - Current
Pre-Seed B2B Venture Fund Focused on Founder Coaching.
Sterling Road is a venture capital firm that invests in pre-seed stage B2B startups.
Advisor
2016 - 2019
Bullpen is a venture capital fund that invests in post-seed capital into early-stage companies.
EIR
2016 - 2017
Trinity Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm.
Cofounder & CEO
2011 - 2016
Acquired by Cameo. YC W12. Business Messaging Solutions. Venture backed business messaging startup. The business grew to multi-million dollar revenue with customers such as: Lyft, Wag, Berkshire Hathaway, Booz Allen Hamilton, Yale and Teach for America; before being acquired by Cameo Global in 2015.
SendHub is the Business Phone System for Mobile.
Raised $10,000,000.00 from Mark Williamson and Second Century Ventures.
Product, Director of Ranking
2010 - 2011
Led development of Scoring, Influence Graph and Topics. Scaled scoring and graph algorithms from a few million scores to hundreds of millions.
Klout is an application that measures and ranks its users according to online social influence by using social media analytics.
Raised $40,000,000.00 from ff Venture Capital, DNX Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Idealab, Tuesday Capital, Zelkova Ventures, ff Venture Capital, IVP, Paige Craig and Venrock.
Lead Relevance Engineer
2009 - 2010
Led relevance team. Projects: crowdsourced data collection, ML based relevance training & A/B testing.
Engineer
2008 - 2009
Linguistic engineering: efficient solutions for language problems, query meaning and data extraction from free text.
Founder & Managing Director
2003 - 2008
Led the development of training software, websites, intranets, SEO and internal search solutions.
2nd Lieutenant, Troop Commander
2001 - 2002
Commanded 36 soldiers in a Logistics Troop, based in North West Germany.