R. Martin Roscheisen
CEO, Diamond Foundry Inc.
United States
Invests in
Work Experience
Founder & CEO
2013
Created world’s first single-crystal diamond wafer to power chips and propel advances in everything from cloud & AI compute, wireless, and electric-car power electronics. TIME Best Innovation 2018 Fast Company World's Most Innovative Company 2018 www.DF.com Jewelry business: www.VRAI.com
2002 - 2010
Founder & CEO
2002 - 2010
Created Silicon Valley's first solar tech startup financed by American venture capital and turned it into the highest-valued solar startup and a global flagship tech company in an industry going through the hurricane of growth from a marginal to the lowest-cost energy source. We created a 15% efficient solar semiconductor cell by printing nanoparticles onto a mile-long Aluminum foil. Company set the standard in solar power capital efficiency through a process that enabled an efficient solar cell to simply be printed. Grew company from zero to 350 employees (mostly engineers), secured >$4 billion in purchase contracts backed by the world's largest power producers. Raised the largest rounds of private equity funding of any tech co world-wide in each of the years 2006 and 2008. Stayed clear of any infamous government loans. Led the team to develop completely novel "breakthrough" semiconductor printing process technology and transform it into production tooling and factory implementations and ramp serial production in fabs in the U.S. and Germany. Under my tenure as CEO — one of the longest in the industry — Nanosolar became the most highly valued solar power technology company backed by American venture capital. The company lost its way after the board ousted me, and like most every other solar tech company did not end up not surviving the industry transformation towards the reality of grid parity solar power. Got terminated by Benchmark Capital's Solyndra-IPO obsessed Bill Gurley after eight years on the job. (Solyndra went bankrupt within months and became a showcase of gov waste.) Nanosolar had $250m of cash in the bank when I left and production scaling fast but the new team of Cisco etc execs drove it professionally fast into the ground.
1998 - 2000
Founder & CEO
1998 - 2000
Co-founded and built one of the first "social media" Internet services from 3 to 160 employees and zero to 50 million users. Acquired by Yahoo in 2000 for $450 million. Michael Moritz served on the board for Sequoia Capital. Without the dotcom crash, eGroups may have well ended up occupying the market that Facebook owns today.
1997 - 1998
Co-founder & Founding CTO
1997 - 1998
Co-founded developer of business-to-business trading software with Stanford professor Yoav Shoham. Acquired by Ariba for $1.2B, the company's software is today routinely used in procurement by companies such as IBM.
1995 - 1998
Co-founder, Chairman & CTO
1995 - 1998
Started company with two Stanford Law School co-founders to profitably grow into the most popular website in legal information. Acquired by Thomson Reuters.