Russ Wilcox
We are delighted to announce that Em Batt has joined Pillar VC as a Senior Associate.
I first met Em while teaching an entrepreneurship course at Harvard Business School. Em stood out because of her perceptive questions and because the rest of the students showed such a clear affection and respect for her. When we later decided to search for a Senior Associate, she was at the top of our list.
Em exhibits so many traits we value at Pillar! She is a kind and authentic person, both upbeat about possibilities and realistic about challenges. She shifts effortlessly between hard technology details in one conversation to practical business plans in the next. Her resilience and determination are self-evident, and she is a person of integrity who inspires trust.
Em grew up in New Hampshire and graduated from Northeastern with a summa degree in physics. She spent her first five years after college as a mechanical engineer, developing dozens of healthcare and hardware product designs at Fikst, a local development firm. After working on Internet of Things devices, she became fascinated by software and switched into product management, ultimately leading product teams first at Kayak (travel) and then paperlessParts (job shop software). She wanted to go further in business and next attended Harvard for a joint graduate degree that combined an MBA at HBS with an engineering data science MS degree at SEAS, and out of that program helped launch a microfluidics startup. After graduation she joined Google as a product manager for data privacy.
With her engineering and product management background, Em hopes to help founders raise the odds of developing a hit product, which is a key success factor at seed stage.
If you are part of the startup scene, or working on a new company and interested in connecting, please feel free to reach out directly to Em at emily@pillar.vc. To learn more about her perspectives on engineering and product management, be sure to follow her on Twitter at @_embatt and on her blog at embatt.com.