Morris co-founded and provided the initial funding for Xenex, which produces a robot used to disinfect hospitals. Previously he co-founded Rackspace Managed Hosting (NYSE:RAX)(brought private by Apollo for $4.3 billion). Morris also founded Curtis Hill Publishing, the first company to publish Texas case law on CD-ROM, which he successfully sold to Thomson Legal Publishing.

Morris has also started and managed a series of investment vehicles through which he has made numerous investments and advised many startups. His investments include Inventables, Adometry, Golfballs.com, Samba TV, Ripple IT, Admissions Lab, Pocket Power and Enchanted Rock Reliability Services.

Morris has appeared on CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and Bloomberg. Morris has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and numerous technical and medical publications.

Originally from San Antonio, Morris is a graduate of the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University, The University of Texas at Austin, and Phillips Exeter Academy.

CEO and Co-founder

• Produces robots used to disinfect hospital rooms.

President and Co-founder

• A managed cloud computing company.
• Brought private by Apollo for $4.3 billion.

Founder

• First company to publish Texas case law on CD-ROM – sold to Thomson Legal Publishing.
  

Matt founded Tectonic Ventures with help from Juan Leungli, who joined Tectonic from General Catalyst, and Morris Miller, a co-founder of Rackspace. 

Rhodes-Kropf was formerly the CFO of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, where he played a pivotal role in launching the firm and the world’s first Alzheimer’s imaging agent. He also helped launch a multi-strat hedge fund as the COO and advised in the creation and growth of the quantitative venture capital firm Correlation Ventures and the deep-value fund Stonehouse Corporation.

Matthew is passionate about teaching entrepreneurship and fintech in the Finance Department at MIT. His research on venture capital and exits has been published in leading finance and economics journals. Previously a faculty member in the Entrepreneurial Management department at Harvard Business School, he taught VCPE and published numerous HBS cases. He was also a finance professor at Columbia University, where he taught Entrepreneurial Finance.

Rhodes-Kropf's work has been profiled in the Financial Times, The Economist, the MIT Sloan Management Review, Kauffman publications, Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine, PeHub, etc. He is regularly quoted in major print media like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and has appeared on television networks including CNBC, BBC, and CNN. Matthew frequently gives talks worldwide on the financing of innovation.

A graduate of Duke University, Professor Rhodes-Kropf holds a BA in computer science and economics and a Ph.D. in game theory. He serves on the board of Duke University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, was the previous Chair of Duke’s Graduate School, and is a board participant at several Tectonic portfolio companies, including Auterion, Butlr, Neighborhood Trust, Rendered.ai, Tifin.ai, Vecna Robotics, Wyebot, and Xenex.

Founder & Partner
Prior to Tectonic Ventures Matt led numerous deal-by-deal investments.

Professor, Visiting

• Teaches the Fintech Ventures course, helping students launch new companies.
• Research focuses on the financing of innovation.

Professor

Juan’s personal path to tech has had a few turns, starting with moving to the U.S. without his parents at 15 and working countless jobs ranging from selling hot dogs to answering switchboard calls to fund college.

Most recently, Juan worked at General Catalyst focusing on early stage investing and leading the coverage of Boston startups – he worked closely with companies like B12.io, Catalant (fka HourlyNerd) and Feedvisor. Prior to General Catalyst, Juan was in San Francisco as part of the team at Javelin Venture Partners focusing on Series A investments and working with companies like MasterClass. Juan’s experience in technology covers a wide spectrum – launching Ripple Concerts, a marketplace for live music, working with seed companies while at Primary Ventures in New York, helping the digital turnaround efforts at McGraw-Hill Education and advising large companies like AMD, Fairchild Semi, IAC/InterActiveCorp, IMG, Ticketmaster, Universal Orlando and VeriFone on their financing strategies while at J.P. Morgan.

Juan is a Board participant and / or advisor at Aestuary, Appex, Butlr, Kontempo, and Villa Homes. He was awarded “Rising Star in VC” by the New England Venture Capital Association in 2017 and was nominated by peers in 2022 and 2023 as one of the “most important VCs in the U.S. / Boston, according to other VCs” (Business Insider). Juan graduated from Boston University with a B.S., summa cum laude, in Business and a minor in Statistics and from Harvard Business School with an MBA where he was a National Society of Hispanic MBAs Scholar and was awarded the Rock Entrepreneurship, Toigo and InSITE Fellowships. While at Harvard, Juan co-founded Rock Venture Partners, a program for students to invest in student-led startups. Outside of work, Juan enjoys eating his way through Boston with his family and teaching new tricks to his goldendoodle. Follow Juan on Twitter via @juanleungli.

Executive Coach

Venture Capital Advisor (EIR),
Rock Center for Entrepreneurship

Primary Ventures
Javelin Venture Partners
General Catalyst

Robert Toigo Foundation

Mark is a Principal investor at Tectonic Ventures and a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, where he supports member companies as well as students spinning out their research into startups. Mark earned his MBA from MIT Sloan, where he was a Fellow with the Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship & Development. Previously, Mark was a research scientist and founding member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, where he led Strategy & Operations and published work in graph convolutional networks and algorithmic fairness. At IBM Research, Mark formed and led the Advanced Prototyping Team along with the global Think Labs focused on early stage productization (including LLMs) and business impact with strategic IBM customers.

Mark also spent two years as a graduate researcher and corporate membership manager in the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. His work on blockchain-based property records culminated in a publication in Management Science, distinguished with a Best Paper award over a 3-year span. 

Mark gained much of his perspective on business, government, and society having spent the first chapter of his career focused on international poverty and development. He is the co-producer of the critically acclaimed film Poverty, Inc., which premiered on Netflix in 2016, won the $100K Templeton Freedom Award, and toured the international film festival circuit. Today, he also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Harambe Alliance of African Entrepreneurs.

In his personal life, Mark is an ultramarathon runner, free diver, backcountry skier, mediocre chess player, and adventure motorcyclist who appreciates constructive dialogue and kindness in all things.

Biederman is also co-author of a book titled, Reimagining Work: Strategies to Disrupt Talent, Lead Change, and Win with a Flexible Workforce, which lays out a vision and path for a new relationship between global companies and talent.

More than 30 percent of the Fortune 100 use Catalant’s platform to frictionlessly access and deploy talent, ranging from employees to over 70,000 elite independent consultants and 1,000 boutique firms in Catalant’s Expert Marketplace. Anonymized data from leading companies train Catalant’s AI-powered skills matching and recommendation engine, inform its best practices, and surface intelligent insights that get smarter over time. Based in Boston, Catalant serves thousands of clients, including GE, Hess, and Unilever, as well as many others on a confidential basis. The company has raised more than $100 million in venture capital funding from leading firms and individuals including General Catalyst, Highland Capital, Greylock Partners, Salesforce, Mark Cuban, the Kraft family and countless others.

Prior to founding Catalant, Biederman was a private equity investor at Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital, where he focused on the healthcare and high-tech industries. In these roles, he served as an advisor to and collaborator with both public and private management teams on topics including organic growth, competitive strategy, mergers and acquisitions, capital allocation, and financing strategy.

Rob is also an Executive Fellow in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School, co-teaching the Scaling Technology Ventures course on funding and accelerating the growth of disruptive internet companies.

Biederman graduated from Princeton University with an A.B., cum laude, in Economics and Finance, and from Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar. He played on the junior varsity basketball team and served as Student Body President.

The technology behind Kymeta’s products were Nathan’s brainchild as a PhD student. He led the original technology development as Kymeta’s CTO before taking the reigns as CEO in 2014.

As CEO Nathan led Kymeta’s transition from laboratory exploration into a product and services company – building a global supply chain to use excess liquid crystal display production capacity (and its $250B in global infrastructure) to make Kymeta’s ground breaking mTenna products. The mTenna remains the first and only solid state product on the market to challenge mechanically scanned VSAT (dish) antennas and has been deployed globally in nearly every mobile communications market including maritime, automotive, rail, IOT, first responders, and defense.

Nathan also recognized the importance of bringing a complete solution to the market (not just an antenna) and forged a partnership with the world’s largest satellite operator, Intelsat, to bring Kymeta’s own service to market around the world.

Nathan has also been recognized by LinkedIn as one of the top 10 technology professionals under 40, and has been inducted into the Duke Graduate School’s Few-Glasson Society.

Nathan has a Master's in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Physics from Duke University. His work has covered topics in low-temperature condensed matter physics as well as metamaterials and microwave devices. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 patents and patent applications as well as over 30 peer reviewed publications; including award-winning doctoral research. Nathan is currently an adjunct assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at Duke University and a member of the Duke University Graduate School Board of Visitors.

Daniel’s deep industry knowledge and practice of continuous innovation has made Vecna Robotics a leading provider of autonomous material handling and workflow optimization solutions. Vecna Robotics offers a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and the Pivotal™ orchestration engine to optimize and orchestrate the movement of goods through industrial settings, including warehouses, distribution centers, and manufacturing facilities.

Theobald is a co-founder and Director of MassRobotics and holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He has received the Henry Ford II Scholar Award, NSF Fellowships, and a Hertz Fellowship award.

An electrical engineer and historian of technology with thirty years’ experience in robotics and autonomy, David has been on the faculty at MIT for twenty-five years, as professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and as the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing; he currently Chairs the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. He is co-author (with David Autor and Elizabeth Reynolds) of the Task Force’s final report, "The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines" (2020).

David is an expert on the myriad relationships between people and autonomous robots, he has participated in more than twenty-five oceanographic expeditions and is an inventor on nine patents in autonomous helicopters, AI-assisted piloting, and RF navigation. He is the author of five books, including Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (2015) and Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (2008) and numerous studies on technology and policy, including The Future of Human Spaceflight (2008). David has undergraduate degrees from Yale and a Ph.D. from MIT.

David splits his time between Cambridge Massachusetts and East Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife, a choral conductor, and his two daughters. He is an instrument-rated private pilot and flies a Beechcraft Bonanza.

Felipe Delgado is Co-Founder, President, and CFO of Merama, a company that partners with and grows the largest e-commerce businesses in Latin America. With operations in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and the US, the company has grown to have more than 80 brands in its portfolio and +US$600M in revenue in its first 3 years of operations, while having maintained a positive EBITDA and CF through the life of the business. Dual headquartered in Mexico City and Sao Paulo, Merama is backed by leading global VCs and PEs.

Prior to starting Merama, Felipe was CFO of Beetmann, a qualified supplier company based in Mexico that utilizes AI and IoT solutions to help optimize energy consumption in real time. He is still a partner at the company and a member of its Board of Directors.

Felipe started off his professional career at JPMorgan, in the US Oil & Gas Investment Bank group. He holds a BBA in Finance from The University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated with honors, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.