Leonard Speiser
Founder IM '96, UGC '99, Bix (sold Yahoo!) 2006, Clover (sold First Data) 2010. CSFB IBank, Trinity, Intuit, eBay, MIT
Los Altos, California
Invests in
Stages:
Sectors:
Locations:
Min Investment:
$100,000.00Max Investment:
$5,000,000.00Target Investment:
$2,000,000.00
Skills
Education
- MI
Work Experience
2020
Founder & Managing Partner
2020
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. Our partner in this journey is Jones Lang Lasalle, an $18B, 100K person property/real estate company. We founded 4 companies in the first year, each has found an immediate customer hungry for their solution.
2023
Founder, PruStudio
2023
PruStudio is the corporate venture studio for Prudential. We found companies whose first customer/channel is Prudential and then recruit founding teams to grow these companies across customers 2 to N.
Founder, Spark X
2020
JLL Spark X is the corporate venture studio for JLL. We found companies whose first customer/channel is JLL and then recruit founding teams to grow these companies across customers 2 to N.
2010 - 2017
Co-Founder
2010 - 2017
- Sold company to First Data/KKR - Clover has shipped over 1 million hardware devices, processes over $250B 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.
2016 - 2016
Board Director & Co-Founder
2016 - 2016
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.
2016 - 2016
Investor
2016 - 2016
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.
2009 - 2010
Co-Founder
2009 - 2010
Ran an incubator of about 20 products.
2009 - 2009
Entrepreneur-in-residence
2009 - 2009
Worked with the great team at Trinity. Helped evaluate companies and made connections to entrepreneurs.
2007 - 2009
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.
2006 - 2009
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.