Beth is a humanities-turned-engineering academic turned entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who has worked at the forefront of multiple technology-driven cultural shifts. She is really good at pattern recognition, and her superpower is probably the ability to understand complex problem spaces and know what potential users really want despite what they say they need – and contextualize that within larger infrastructure and societal constraints. She was on the front lines of the early days of the Internet, and has published 3 books and 30+ of articles on text-based virtual worlds, early messaging platforms and social networks, digital games, and technology for international development.
She worked on some of the earliest digital health tools for emerging markets as a professor at UW, and started medical device company Shift Labs to build affordable medical devices for global markets; 1000s of their devices have been deployed to combat epidemics around the world. She’s a Senior Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund and a VP at Pack Ventures, where she’s working to ensure venture contributes to equity on both the financial and the social fronts.
“I want to help build better technologies that would advance the plot of humanity and bring us forward.Beth Kolko : Design Professor, Co-Founder, Venture Partner / University of Washington, Shift Labs, Pack VC
