- Martin Roscheisen
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Martin Roscheisen Born Roland Martin Röscheisen
Muenchen, GermanyResidence San Francisco, California Citizenship Austrian Education Munich Technical University (B.S., 1992)
Stanford University (Ph.D., 1997)Occupation Technologist, entrepreneur Website [1] R. Martin Roscheisen is an Austrian-American technology entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley.
Contents
Background and Education
According to a profile in German business journal Handelsblatt.[1] Martin Roscheisen was born and raised in Munich, Germany, as an Austrian citizen. Attending Feodor Lynen high school near Munich, he graduated valedictorian in 1987. While still a teenager, he spent a year at the legendary Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley. He subsequently studied computer science and electrical engineering at Munich Technical University, graduating at the top of his class. In 1992, he moved to California to earn a doctorate in engineering at Stanford University (with fellow students in Terry Winograd's group of the same year including Sergey Brin and Larry Page.)
Entrepreneurship
In the 1990s, Roscheisen was among the first generation of entrepreneurs pursuing opportunities in the commercial Internet; and in 2000+, he was one of the first entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to focus on green energy technology.
In 1995, Roscheisen co-founded FindLaw, which became the most widely used Internet legal site, for the first time making U.S. case law including all Supreme Court decisions accessible to the public. FindLaw is now a business unit of Thomson's West Group.
In 1997, Roscheisen, with Stanford professor Yoav Shoham, created TradingDynamics, an enterprise software company which was acquired by Ariba for $740 million in 2000.
In 1998, Roscheisen became founder & CEO of eGroups, an email messaging company, which was financed by Sequoia Capital and ultimately acquired by Yahoo for $450 million. (Google founder Larry Page's brother Carl was a co-founder of eGroups too.[2])
In 2000, Roscheisen teamed up with Mark Pincus (today CEO of Zynga) to form an incubator called Tank Hill Projects (named after a neighborhood hill in the vicinity of which both reside in San Francisco) to create a series of new companies. Funded with an initial $10 million, the entity rapidly expanded to a headcount of 50 but shut down by October of the same year to return capital at minimum loss.[3]
In 2002, Roscheisen co-founded and became Chairman & CEO of the first solar energy company in Silicon Valley focused on making solar power broadly affordable: Nanosolar.[4] Nanosolar pioneered a fast process for simply printing solar cells on low-cost metal foil. Roscheisen raised more than $500 million in capital for Nanosolar (starting with Google founders, angels like Reid Hoffman and Sunil Paul and VC Benchmark Capital), built two factories of substantial production capacity, and secured $4.1 billion in customer supply contracts.[5] Under Roscheisen, Nanosolar became a Silicon Valley flagship company in green technology, widely featured in the media including Fortune,[6] Gigaom,[7] the SJ Merc,[8] Wired,[9] VentureBeat,[10] EDN,[11] Motley Fool's,[12] Business Week,[13] USA Today,[14] and receiving a number of outstanding awards such as the #1 technology innovation award in 2007 by Popular Science Magazine [15] and TIME magazine's innovation of the year award [16] as well as the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneer award.[17] After eight years as Chairman & CEO, Roscheisen left the company in 2010, with no reason announced.[2].
Miscellaneous
- In 2003 (Sep 15, 2003), Fortune Magazine named Roscheisen as one of United States' "40 under 40"[18](Fortune Top 40 Under 40).
- In 2007, along with Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Roscheisen was an executive producer of an independent film IMDB:Roscheisen.
- Roscheisen's San Francisco home was featured on the cover of Dwell magazine in 2002 for its award winning design.
- Roscheisen was awarded a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2007 [19] and a TIME magazine award for most innovative product of the year.[20]
References
- ^ German WSJ
- ^ eGroups
- ^ Mark Pincus
- ^ SJMN San Jose Mercury News
- ^ Nanosolar Blog
- ^ Fortune on Doerr and Roscheisen
- ^ Earth2Tech
- ^ SJ Merc
- ^ Wired
- ^ GreenBeat
- ^ EDN
- ^ Motley Fool's
- ^ Business Week
- ^ USA Today
- ^ Popular Science Magazine
- ^ TIME Awards
- ^ World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer award
- ^ Fortune Magazine via CNN
- ^ WEF
- ^ TIME Magazine
Categories:- Businesspeople in information technology
- Living people
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