Leonard Speiser
Founder of Prudential Financial
Los Altos, California
Overview
Work Experience
Founder & Managing Partner
2020 - Current
Horizon 3 is a Corporate Venture Studio. Just as Amazon jumpstarted AWS by being it's first customer, we believe that within every large, successful company is the opportunity to jumpstart a billion dollar startup. Instead of building inside the company, Horizon 3 works with entrepreneurs to found companies outside, but gives them insider access to the company's formidable resources. Two of our partners in this journey are Jones Lang Lasalle, an $18B, 100K person property/real estate company and Prudential, a global insurer managing >$1T in retirement and insurance assets.
Board Director & Co-Founder
2017 - 2020
Level developed a commercial oven with RF steering, RGB/Thermal Cameras, closed loop AI algos to steer heat to multiple foods at the same time and automate cooking.
Markov Corporation is an application of artificial intelligence to solve problems.
Investor
2016 - 2019
The world's first Deep Learning fund. Specifically, I'm excited by the ability of this technology to tackle problems that previously would have taken traditional programmers far too long. From medical diagnostics to construction, there are going to be a lot of exciting opportunities for this tool in the future. The fund is now closed and not making new investments.
NeuronVC is a fund for early stage application-verticalized deep learning startups.
Co-Founder
2010 - 2017
- Sold company to First Data/KKR - Clover has shipped over 1 million hardware devices, processes over $300B in credit cards, and supports over 150 third party apps on our platform. - Clover opens the counter top of the brick and mortar merchant to a world of innovative developers. We bring a combination of outstanding hardware, reliable services, and developer friendly software to the stale world of point of sale. - We are the fastest growing POS in all of history. We are fanatical about quality. We inspire our merchants to dream bigger than they ever could before. - To make it possible to marry the world of Silicon Valley with the traditional banking style payments business, we worked with KKR to create a unique structure that I hope many other companies follow in the future. It's called a "Founder's Provision". If the autonomy of the Founder is altered in any way, there is a extremely large financial payout to the team. This enables a company to run as an independent entity based on Silicon Valley rules, while binding them with the channel power of an established market leader in a vertical.
Co-Founder
2009 - 2010
Ran an incubator of about 20 products.
Entrepreneur-in-residence
2009 - 2009
Worked with the great team at Trinity. Helped evaluate companies and made connections to entrepreneurs.
Trinity Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm.
Senior Director, Product
2007 - 2009
Yahoo Groups had not be touched for 10 years (same code from the original acquisition). We started work on a complete rebuild of the product but it became clear that the company needed a lot more help than a new Yahoo Groups to survive.
Yahoo is a technology and media company that serves users through its portfolio of digital platforms, products, and services.
Raised $6,800,000.00 from Visa, SoftBank Capital, Sequoia Capital and Reuters Venture Capital.
Co-Founder & Director, Product
2006 - 2009
- Acquired by Yahoo! - We built a killer voting engine that allowed anyone to vote even without registering and detected fraud with great precision. Our voting algorithm brought the best singing, photography and acting talent to the top. - Eight months after fund raising, two months after launch we were acquired by Yahoo! (in February 2007) to help them build a global brand like 19 Entertainment. Enough has been written about Yahoo! that you probably figured out what happened.
Group Product Manager
2000 - 2005
- Added Fixed Price to the core marketplace, accounted for 25% of items 4 weeks after launch. I am most proud of this project and we did it as a skunkworks project that surprised everyone. - Launched the API program at eBay in 2000, 40% of items listed through it within 6 months of launch. Worked with some fantastic developers and learned a lot about building platforms. - You wouldn't believe it, but no one wanted to work on search at eBay in 2001. I ask for it and was able to work with some world class engineers to find all of the dead ends with search and start fixing them. Stemming, Transliteration, Too Few Items, Too Many, and a new search engine that still serves the company today. - Last role before I left I created a team focused on retaining and engaging buyers on eBay. Products included My eBay, View Item, Toolbar, Registration, Home Page, and Favorites.
EBay Ventures invests in disruptive companies that are revolutionizing the commerce landscape.
Founder, CEO
1999 - 2000
Vision was to enable users to upload text, photos, video and share online. I didn't execute this one the right way, but the team was awesome and went on to build great companies.