FOUNDING TEAM
Stephan Dolezalek is the founder of Resourcient Group, LLC. He is a highly experienced investor, entrepreneur, board member and counsel across the technological disruption of the agriculture, biotechnology, clean energy, communications and software industries. He has been a Managing or Executive Director of six private equity funds since 2000, with more than $4Bn in capital under management.
Stephan is an Executive Director of the Wheatsheaf Group, LLC, a private investment arm of the Grosvenor Estate – the family office of the Duke of Westminster. Wheatsheaf Group directly operates, invests in and helps to develop businesses in the food and agriculture sectors. It actively manages a $500 million portfolio with one of the largest investment teams in the ag-tech venture investment space, having made investments in roughly 20 different businesses in that sector. Stephan is also the Chairman of Aerofarms, a leading controlled indoor agriculture business.
Stephan has been a private equity investor since 1999. He served as Senior Advisor to the members of the Gates organization responsible for forming the Breakthrough Energy Ventures (“BEV”) fund, helping develop and communicate BEV's initial strategy, areas of investment focus, initial investment theses, organizational structure, and identification of investment team members. Prior to that Stephan was a Managing Director at VantagePoint Capital Partners, founding and leading one of the largest clean energy venture funds for almost two decades. Collectively, the VantagePoint group made 42 clean technology investments totaling roughly $1 billion. Under his leadership the Firm’s CleanTech practice was several times named CleanTech Investor of the Year.
He has co-founded three companies, been a board member of numerous venture-backed and publicly traded companies and has personally led more than two dozen private equity investments. He has built a strong investment track record in the software, biotechnology, clean energy and agricultural sectors.
Stephan is a graduate of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia (BCP) and was a founding member of the School’s Foundation Board of Trustees. He also holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Virginia School of Law.
Martin Lagod co-founded Firelake Capital Management in 2002 and built and led the Firm’s private investment practice. Through two funds, Firelake deployed more than $175M into two dozen portfolio companies.
Marty’s investment experience includes solar and energy storage, food security, water, carbon markets, refrigerants, biochemical/fuels, and industrial materials and metals. Marty has spent the last two years developing new investment models to address financing and execution risk through improved governance and investment structures.
He served as Co-Chair of the Clean Economy Network and on the Board of the Advanced Energy Economy. Previously, Marty was the co-founder and CEO of Solo Energy Corporation which developed technology for distributed generation of power for the commercial and light industrial sectors.
For the previous 19 years, Marty was an intellectual property attorney based in Silicon Valley, first as a partner in the Palo Alto office of Phoenix-based Brown and Bain, and then at Cooley Godward in Palo Alto. He holds two patents related to the distributed generation of power. Marty holds a BA in Economics, with Honors, from the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and a JD from Vanderbilt University.
Andrew Shapiro, founder of Broadscale Group, has spent the last two decades working at the nexus of new technologies and societal transformation -- with a focus over the last dozen years on energy and environmental innovation. Broadscale works with a network of some of the largest energy companies to accelerate innovation through strategic partnerships with the most promising new companies in the sector. He has invested in, advised, and served on boards of more than twenty start-ups. Previously, in 2000, Andrew founded GreenOrder, a strategic advisory firm that has worked with more than 100 enterprises to make energy and environmental innovation a source of competitive advantage. Highlights include working with GE's leadership on the creation and execution of its multi-billion dollar ecomagination initiative; counseling GM on strategic issues including the launch of the Chevrolet Volt; and serving as the green advisor for 7 World Trade Center, NYC’s first LEED-certified office tower. A regular speaker at conferences, former visiting faculty at Columbia and Yale, and author of two books and dozens of articles, Fortune has described him as “green business’s go-to guy.”
Stefan Heck is CEO and co-Founder of NAUTO, a smart car and urban mobility company. NAUTO’s proprietary, computer vision-enhanced system is an affordable way to upgrade any car to get network and safety features previously only available in high-end luxury cars.
Dr. Heck is also Consulting Professor at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, and directs the Energy Transformation Collaborative (ETC) a new program applying the talent of the Stanford community and Silicon Valley to develop and deploy novel solutions to the world’s most vexing energy problems.
Previously he was a Director (senior partner) at McKinsey and co-founded and led the Cleantech and Sustainability practice. Stefan has worked extensively with Global 100 technology, industrial, infrastructure, building systems, retail, utility and energy companies across the US, China, Korea, Japan, India, and Europe.
Stefan is on the Innovation Advisory Board of United Technologies, the board of the Biomimicry Institute, the advisory boards of New World Capital, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, and the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford and has published a book Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century.
Stefan received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from UCSD and a B.S. with honors in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. His research focused on deep learning.
