Board

NewSchools is supported and guided by a strong board of directors that brings years of organization-building experience to bear on this work.

Brook Byers

Brook Byers has been a venture capital investor since 1972. He has been closely involved with more than forty new technology-based ventures, over half of which have become public companies. Brook was the founding president and chairman of four biotechnology companies, incubated in KPCB’s offices, that went on to become public companies with an aggregate market value of more than $8 billion. He is currently on the board of directors of nine companies, most recently joining Genomic Health Incorporated and Five Prime Therapeutics.

Brook was president and a director of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists. He is currently a board member of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Foundation, Stanford’s Bio-X Advisory Council and the Stanford Eye Council. He was formerly a Director of the Entrepreneurs Foundation, the California Healthcare Institute, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council, That Many May See (UCSF) Vision Research Foundation (Chairman), the Georgia Tech Advisory Board and was a founder of TechNet.

Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Brook graduated in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and received an MBA from Stanford.

John Doerr

John Doerr joined Intel in 1974 just as they invented the famous “8080” 8 bit microprocessor. At Intel he held various engineering, marketing and management assignments, and was one of their top-ranked sales executives.

In 1980 he joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and sponsored a series of investments including Compaq, Cypress, Intuit, Netscape, Lotus, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, S3, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Symantec and Google.

John was the founding CEO of Silicon Compilers. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Google. The privately-held company boards include Miasole, and Bloom Energy.

John Doerr holds Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rice University and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.

Chris Gabrieli

Chris Gabrieli is an entrepreneur across the fields of business, education and public policy. As one of the nation’s leading thinkers in education, he has been at the forefront of the movement to rethink the school calendar.

Following his success as a venture capitalist, Chris co-founded Massachusetts 2020, a non-profit organization with the mission to expand the economic and educational opportunities for children families across Massachusetts.

After leading the state’s first-in-the-nation initiative to expand learning time in public schools, Massachusetts 2020 grew its work to include districts across the country through a partner organization, the National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL). Chris serves as Chairman of NCTL, a national think tank, which conducts research, supports public policy and provides direct support to schools across the nation, all centered in how schools can use more learning time to ensure students gain the academic skills they need and enjoy the well-rounded education they deserve.

In addition, Chris co-authored a book with Warren Goldstein entitled Time to Learn: How a New School Schedule is Making Smarter Kids, Happier Parents, and Safer Neighborhoods, published by Jossey-Bass in 2008, which serves as a blueprint for policymakers and district leaders as they think about redesigning the school day. Chris is also currently a part-time lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Chris is a committed participant in the civic life of Boston and Massachusetts serving now and in the past on numerous civic and university boards. He won the Democratic primary for Lt. Governor in 2002 and came in second in the Democratic primary for Governor in 2006. Chris and his wife Hilary live in Boston where they raise their five school-age children.

Dave Goldberg

Dave founded LAUNCH Media Inc. in 1994, which delivered music and music-related content online, and he led the company through its acquisition by Yahoo! in 2001. Following the sale, Dave served as Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo! Music, where he led the company’s global music operations and built it into the Internet’s most popular music destination. During his tenure, traffic increased from two million to twenty five million unique users per month, and four billion music videos were streamed in 2006 alone. In 2006, Dave was named one of Billboard Magazine’s top power players in digital music. Recently Dave served as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Benchmark Capital where he evaluated investment opportunities for the firm and advised portfolio companies. Earlier in his career, Dave was Director of Marketing Strategy and New Business Development at Capitol Records. Dave also serves on the Board of Directors at Ancestry.com, GMG Entertainment and Dashbox. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a BA degree in History and Government.

Laurene Powell Jobs

Ms. Laurene Powell Jobs is founder and chair of Emerson Collective, an organization focused on harnessing the potential of individuals from underserved communities to help them build a better life. The Collective supports social entrepreneurs and organizations working in the areas of education, social justice and conservation. It primarily advocates on behalf of underserved students.

Ms. Powell Jobs also serves as president of the board of College Track, an after-school program she founded in 1997 to prepare underserved high school students for success in college. Started in East Palo Alto, College Track has expanded to serve students in Oakland, San Francisco, New Orleans and Aurora, Colorado. The programʼs intensive academic and extracurricular program is designed to ensure admittance to and graduation from college. All of the program’s graduates have completed their secondary education and gone on to college.

In addition to her work with the Emerson Collective and College Track, she serves on the boards of directors of NewSchools Venture Fund, New America Foundation and Conservation International. She also serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ms. Powell Jobs holds a BA and a BSE from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Earlier in her career, she spent several years working in investment banking and later co-founded a natural foods company in California.

Joanna Rees

Joanna Rees founded VSP Capital in late 1996 and brings significant experience in operations, finance and marketing to NewSchools Venture Fund. In addition to her eight years in finance and investment banking, Joanna has held several senior management positions with Groupe Danone, General Foods, Digital Equipment Corp., Texaco, Brown Forman and RJR Nabisco. She currently serves on the boards of directors of IVAST, QuinStreet, Sabrix, Quovera and Candera.

The World Economic Forum selected Joanna as a Year 2000 Global Leader for Tomorrow for individuals who hold positions “of considerable power, influence and responsibility,” and are “global in terms of their accomplishments and potential.” The National Association of Women Business Owners named her “The 2000 Entrepreneur of the Year Rising Star.” Most recently, the Aspen Institute selected Joanna for its 2002 Class of Henry Crown Fellows, a program designed to develop the next generation of community-spirited business leaders. She is very active in the San Francisco nonprofit community, having served in several leadership roles for the Junior League and the March of Dimes. Joanna earned her MBA from Columbia University and a BS from Duke University.

Jon Sackler

Jon Sackler divides his time between business and non-profit pursuits.  

Mr. Sackler is the Managing Partner in North Bay Associates and Kokino LLC, and a co-founder of TRQ Management Company, all investment management businesses.  He was a past president and remains active with Cheyenne Petroleum Company, an oil and gas exploration and production company, and he was a co-founder of Soundview Real Estate Partners, a real estate investment company.  In addition, he serves on the boards of various companies in the pharmaceutical industry.
 
Mr. Sackler has been active in the nonprofit sector with a particular focus on public education.  He is a Trustee for Achievement First, a growing charter management organization operating twenty public charter schools in four cities serving over 6,000 students.  He was the founding Chairman and is currently a Director with ConnCAN (the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now) and is a Director with 50CAN and Students for Education Reform, all organizations focused on researching, communicating, and advocating for sound research-based public policies in the field of primary and secondary education.
 
Mr. Sackler was born in 1955.  He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley.  He lives in Greenwich with his wife, Mary Corson.  They have three children, two pursuing careers as filmmakers and one in computer science.

Kim Smith

 

Kim Smith is CEO and founder of the Pahara Institute, a national nonprofit that aims to identify, strengthen, and sustain diverse high-potential leaders who are transforming public education. Its programs, including the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship (previously the Aspen-NewSchools Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education Fellowship), are designed to identify seasoned leaders in education reform, and through a time-tested dialogue approach, strengthen, and sustain their efforts to bring about transformational improvements in our public schools – especially those in under-served communities. She is widely recognized as an innovative and entrepreneurial leader in education, and was featured in Newsweek’s report on the “Women of the 21st Century” as “the kind of woman who will shape America’s new century.”

Immediately prior to the Pahara Institute, Kim was co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners, a non-profit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. Earlier in her career she served as a founding team member at Teach For America, created and led an AmeriCorps program for community-based leaders in education, managed a business start-up and completed a brief stint in early online learning at Silicon Graphics. After completing her M.B.A. at Stanford University, she co-founded and led NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy focused on transforming public education through social entrepreneurship, where she helped to catalyze a new, bipartisan, cross-sector community of entrepreneurial change agents for public education.

Ms. Smith has helped to incubate numerous education and social change organizations and has served on a range of boards, which currently include those of Pahara, Bellwether Education Partners, NewSchools Venture Fund, Rocketship Education, and ROADS Charter School. She has authored or co-authored a number of publications about innovation and social entrepreneurial change in education, including “What Is Educational Entrepreneurship?”, “Social Purpose Capital Markets in K–12”, “Creating Responsive Supply in Education”, “Innovation in Education: Problems and Opportunities”, “Supporting and Scaling Change: Lessons from the First Round of the Investing in Innovation (i3) Program”, and “Steering Capital: Optimizing Financial Support for Innovation in Public Education.” She is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.

Dave Whorton

Dave Whorton is the founder and managing partner of Tugboat Ventures, a seed and early stage venture fund focused on serving committed, passionate entrepreneurs with big ideas in consumer internet, cloud computing, mobile, security and SAAS. Tugboat’s small, highly effective team strives to make a significant difference from as early as inception through successful IPO or sale.

After earning a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford´s Graduate School of Business, Whorton found his way to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Texas Pacific Group Ventures, where he developed and incubated numerous investments.

Whorton has been called a “serial entrepreneur.” He was founding CEO of Good Technology (acquired by Motorola); co-founder of Drugstore.com (DSCM) and general manager and president of Optical Engineering, Inc. Dave also worked at Netscape, Hewlett Packard and Bain.

He currently serves on the board of directors of Education Elements, FiveApes, RepairPal and RichRelevance. Prior investments that Dave led include Blue Nile (NILE), Cranium (sold to Hasbro) and SuccessFactors (SFSF). Dave also worked closely with Amazon, Autotrader, E.piphany and Google in their early days. Dave is a founding non-profit board member of CharterCities and NewSchools Venture Fund.