Work

Dan Von KohornI build and invest in tech companies, and serve as a Managing Partner of Broom Ventures. I spend most of my time helping founders and their teams. I focus mostly in software and AI, with applications across financial services, healthcare, education, supply chain, defense, and other markets. 

In the past, I founded companies or worked with early founding teams 14 times, and participated in 35 tech startups resulting in 10 exits totaling $900m+ in enterprise value (through 2021). Prior to Broom, I co-founded Rhombus, a data service “oracle” (acquired by Chainlink) with Broom Partner Jeffrey Rosen.

But startups were a side-gig. I started my career at JP Morgan Asset Management in 1997, and worked on management of more than $4.3B over a career in investment management and venture capital, including 7 years as portfolio manager of a computational commodity fund, and 20 years as Director of Technology Investments for Mediatech Capital. I’ve worked in fixed income, equities, derivatives, and private equity, always with an analytical approach to risk/return expectations and portfolio construction.

I have been studying and building AI/ML systems since 1995. I studied physics, economics, and math at Princeton and was exposed at an early age to machine learning and emergence by great professors including the late John Conway, who invented “cellular automata” and The Game of Life. I wrote my thesis on the efficient market hypothesis applied to global stock market indexes using machine learning to calculate the efficient frontier. I took online courses by Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig and Andrew Ng, and then founded the New England AI meetup in 2011, which became sponsored by Google and grew to 2500+ members. Here is a video of me presenting on machine learning in finance at Microsoft / ODSC in 2015. 

I started working with blockchains in 2016, built a company in partnership with ConsenSys in 2017, founded the Oracle Working Group for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and contributed to the first Specification for Off-Chain Trusted Compute.

I’ve always enjoyed building tech companies and helping tech founders. I co-founded a Boston angel investor group in 2006 and Broom Ventures in 2019. I look for exceptional engineering teams and earnest mission alignment in the companies I work with.

Outside of work, I am married with 3 children. I enjoy electronics, gardening, and forestry, and serve on the Board of the Groton Conservation Trust. Past public service through the US Secret Service NY Electronic Crimes Task Force [1][2]. 

Work Experience

Broom Ventures
March 2019 – present: Co-founder, Managing Partner
San Francisco, Boston

  • Fund management
  • Investment Committee Chair
  • Pre-seed and seed stage technology companies
  • Focus in SaaS and AI, with applications across various fields including financial services, healthcare, education, supply chain, and defense

Chainlink Labs
Jun 2021 – Jun 2022: Enterprise Solutions
United States

  • Connecting data to and across blockchains
  • Worked with enterprises integrating data connections to decentralized applications

Rhombus
December 2016 – Jun 2021: Co-founder, Board member
New York, NY

Xynon
September 2019 – August 2021: Board member
Maryland, USA

  • Financial AI.
  • Acquired v2 Ratings in 2019

v2 Ratings
January 2014 – September 2019: Founder, CEO
Chestnut Hill, MA

  • Formation of data-driven investment rating service
  • Machine learning for valuation and risk (Video)
  • Sold to Xynon in 2019

Beta Fund
July 2012 – present: Founder & Principal
Chestnut Hill, MA

  • Formation and fund management
  • Investment Committee member

Mediatech Capital Partners
July 2002 – July 2023: Director, Technology Investments
July 2001 – July 2002: Vice President
New York, NY

  • Corporate finance, M&A, strategic, and operational advisor.
  • Public and private clients.
  • 60+ projects including acquisitions, financing, restructuring.

ConsenSys
Sept 2018 – July 2019: Advisor
Brooklyn, NY

Wolfram Ventures
July 2016 – May 2018: President, CEO
Somerville, MA

  • Built a venture capital company, a member of the Wolfram consortium of companies.

Apt Capital / VKRA
January 2012 – May 2016: Founder & President of Apt Capital
August 2005 – May 2013: Portfolio Manager of Commodity Investment LP
August 2002 – December 2011: Vice President of VKRA
Chestnut Hill, MA & Westport, CT

  • Portfolio Manager of commodity fund for 7 years
  • Responsibilities in trading, R&D, operations, compliance
  • Member of two-person Investment Committee for three investment limited partnerships.
  • Software engineer with focus on data acquisition and quantitative signaling: relative value, time series, yield & premium curves, fundamental valuation, statistical arbitrage, and efficient frontier modeling.

Beacon Angels
January 2006 – January 2013: Co-founder
Boston, MA

  • Built a community for fast-growing companies and active private investors.
  • Chair of the Screening Committee for 7 years.
  • Deal sourcing, due diligence, & technology focus.

AnIdea Corporation
Sept. 2000 – Sept. 2001: Chief Strategic Officer of AnIdea Corp.
May 1999 – Sept. 2000: Founder & CEO of ThoughtStore, Inc.
New York, NY

  • Founded ThoughtStore, an online intellectual property licensing exchange.
  • Served more than 600 individual and institutional IP portfolio managers.
  • Sold ThoughtStore to AnIdea Corp.
  • Licensed system to Lucent Technologies for license management of software products from Bell Laboratories.

Winged Keel Asset Management
Oct. 1998 – Jan. 2000: Director of Research
New York, NY

  • Responsible for the asset allocation, investment research, and performance measurement for the firm.
  • Developed automated systems for asset allocation, documentation, and client-ready presentations.
  • Built automated notification tools to streamline client communications.
  • Built automated marketing reports to identify cross-selling targets and improve sales pipeline visibility.
  • Technology Committee chairman, Executive Committee member.

JP Morgan Investments, Fixed Income Group
July 1997 – Oct. 1998: Analyst
New York, NY

  • Primary responsibility for development of Broad Market and Tax Aware Frameworks (fixed income asset allocation models). The models produced portfolios optimized by excess or absolute risk and return characteristics, with optimal bet sizes and turnover rates for strategic and tactical management of duration and sector allocations. Tax Aware Framework additionally considered income and capital gains tax rates.
  • Produced 19 custom pitches with asset allocations, resulting in new or enhanced mandates for $4.2 Billion from institutions, government organizations, and high net worth individuals.
  • Assisted development of relative-value program for security selection in dollar-neutral fund overlay strategy for the Multi-Markets Group, an internal hedge fund.
  • Produced market analytics for pricing and strategy of Muni BMA swaps, duration management of taxable portfolios using derivatives, and crossover trading.
  • Taught employee classes for fixed income analytics, derivatives pricing, and asset allocation.
  • Received the only perfect score on the division-wide annual performance review for 1998.

Education

Princeton University
A.B. in Economics
Certificate in Applied and Computational Mathematics
September 1993 – June 1997

  • Graduate courses: Principles of Corporate Finance, Legal and Regulatory Policy Toward Markets, International Macroeconomics, Topics in Applied Economics: Financial Markets.
  • Original Research: Finance: Deviations from MPT, CAPM, and APT, as Applied to Global Equities Indices; Number theory: Order Relations of Infractions.

Wolfram Education Group
M330: Neural Networks, November 2003

  • Feed-forward Neural Networks and Radial Basis Function, Nonlinear Dynamic Black-Box Modeling, Classification and Clustering with Neural Networks.

Online Courses

Additional Experience

Publications

Public Speaking

  • “Web3 Oracles and DLCs for smart contracts that resolve in BTC“, Stacks Accelerator (’22)
  • Panelist, Princeton Entrepreneurship Council, Tiger Entrepreneurs Conference (’22)
  • “They Might be Robots; using data for investment management and trading“, Boston Data Festival at the Microsoft N.E.R.D Center (’15)
  • Panelist, Building Competitive Advantage in the Global Market, Harvard Faculty Club (’08)
  • Guest Speaker, 128 Innovation Capital Group (’08)
  • Guest Speaker, TCN & Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College (’08)
  • Judge, Princeton University Annual Business Plan Competition (’03, ’05, ’06)
  • Guest speaker, Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University (’02)
  • Guest lecturer, Pace University School of Law, LAW 757, Law Seminar: Intellectual Property (’01)
  • Guest lecturer, Baruch college MBA Program, Business Communications (’01)
  • Panelist, New York Law Journal Seminars on the Future of E-Commerce (’00)

Professional Associations

Tech