Beth Kolko

Advisor

2024

Tall Poppy delivers security and digital safety solutions to enterprises and individuals. I serve as an advisor to leadership on strategy, new market exploration, and partnerships.

Board Advisor

2023

Second rotation as a company advisor. Leviathan Security provides a broad range of security services to large enterprises. I serve as an advisor to leadership on strategy, new market exploration, and partnerships.

Professor

2001

Specialist in Human Centered Design. I've spent over fifteen years conducting research in emerging markets, specifically focused on what makes people love technology enough to incorporate it into their everyday life. Trained as an ethnographer, I base my technology design efforts on fieldwork that uncovers hidden patterns of trust, confidence, institutional relationships, and infrastructure context. This means I develop technologies that fit with existing technical and social infrastructure, as well as human capacity. A few years ago, I worked on the development of a low-cost ultrasound system designed for use by midwives in Uganda. That project helped inspire me to start a company, Shift Labs, which is rebuilding medical device development processes to make affordable simplicity a reality in healthcare.

Venture Partner

2022

Senior Venture Partner

2019

Founder

2009

Founder of the Hackademia Project, one of the first initiatives to leverage the creativity and innovation of makerspaces and hacker communities and apply that invention potential to formal educational spaces. Hackademia is dedicated to creating cross-disciplinary innovators, what we call "functional engineers" who share core vocabulary and skills and can work effectively in interdisciplinary teams to create disruptive technologies.

Chairperson, Board Of Directors

2012 - 2024

Co-Founder and CEO

2012 - 2023

I was a co-founder and CEO of Shift Labs, where we created the award-winning DripAssist product line -- innovative, affordable, and easy-to-use IV infusion delivery technologies for non-acute care environments such as out-of-hospital care, LMICs, field medicine, and disaster response. I took a hiatus from the CEO role from 2021 until summer 2022, when I stepped back into that position. Within the decade, healthcare will be distributed in its delivery. Connected, easy-to-use products will be the heart of this approach. For next-gen pharmaceuticals like biologics and other IV medications, this will translate to remote monitoring, adherence tracking, and data analytics on patient response becoming the core functionality of infusion technology. . Our simple, easy-to-use DripAssist Infusion Rate Monitor is a new approach to providing efficient IV infusions. DripAssist introduces a new business model for infusion, and its minimal training requirements and operating overhead mean patients get the best care while providers reduce costs. A connected DripAssist will launch in 2023 under new ownership, providing the first opportunity to automatically collect infusion data and serve that to EHRs as well as provider dashboards. Given the expansion of out-of-hospital care, this will be a game-changer for IV medication delivery, enabling cost-effective treatments to be delivered in any setting.

Faculty Associate, Berkman Center for Internet and Society

2007 - 2019

Advisory Board member

2011 - 2014