Paul Conley, PhD
VENTURE PARTNER
Veteran Venture Capitalist
Paul Conley is a senior strategic advisor and partner at Genoa Ventures. He is also the CEO of General Inception, a venture studio strategic partner to Genoa, that works in concert with exceptional founders in our network to form companies around high-impact science and technology, preparing those companies for the rigorous Genoa investment process.
Paul has been a partner in early-stage venture capital firms since 2007 when he began his investing career at Paladin Capital Group, a multi-stage PE/VC firm headquartered in Washington, DC with a focus on security and defense technologies. There he founded the life-science investment practice in 2008 before heading to Silicon Valley in 2012. Example first-round investments include QuantaLife (NYSE: BIO), Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ: TWST), 10X Genomics (NASDAQ: TXG), and Inscripta. Additional practice areas where Paul has been historically active include enterprise software, MEMS semiconductors, advanced materials, and advanced computing. More recently, Paul expanded his life-science investing as a partner at Vertical Venture Partners in 2015, leading investments in healthcare delivery, medical devices, life science tools, and therapeutics. He has served on over 30 public and private company boards of directors, often taking additional responsibilities on compensation and audit committees.
As groundwork for his entry into venture capital, Paul spent 15 years in academic research, technology R&D, and start-up operating roles. After completing post-doctoral applied research in the nuclear weapons stewardship program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2000, he was co-founder and CEO of two start-up companies. Appfluent Technologies was a pioneering player in the distributed, in-memory database systems field while BrightScale successfully commercialized chip-scale supercomputing instruction-set architectures for use in national security applications and high-definition video encoding and transcoding.
Paul earned a Ph.D. in Computational Physics and an MS in Bioengineering from UCSD, as well as an MS and BS in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia.
