Featured Authors
Patrick Ennis, PhD
Senior Partner, Madrona Venture Group, and Senior Fellow,
Potomac Institute for Policy Studies
Dr. Patrick Ennis is a Senior Fellow at the Potomac Institute and has spent a career in science, technology commercialization, and venture capital. Patrick is also a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group where he helps build startup companies in a wide variety of technologies.
Prior to Madrona, Patrick was at Intellectual Ventures for more than a decade, running startup incubation and technology commercialization with a focus on Asian markets. His investments included Evolv Technology (Nasdaq: EVLV), of which he was a founding board member. Patrick was also the founding CTO of Xinova, a startup that pioneered an international open-innovation market network.
Previously Patrick was a Managing Director of ARCH Venture Partners, where he built early-stage startups for ten years. His investments included Impinj (Nasdaq: PI), Innovalight (acquired by DuPont), and Kotura (acquired by Mellanox/NVIDIA).
Before joining the venture capital industry as a Kauffman Fellow in 1998, Patrick worked at AT&T and Bell Labs, leading projects in software development, speech recognition, and network design. He also worked as a product manager in optical networking and a marketing manager for consumer services.
Before joining Bell Labs, Patrick researched nuclear physics at government labs in North America and Europe. During this time, he published many articles in scientific journals, including The Physical Review, Zeitschrift für Physik, and Nuclear Instruments and Methods.
Patrick has served on the boards of more than 25 private and public companies and educational organizations. In the last two decades, Patrick has spent more than 1,000 days abroad conducting business in 31 countries and developing relationships with technology, corporate, and academic leaders. Patrick holds a Ph.D., MS, and MPhil in physics from Yale, an MBA in finance from Wharton, and a BS in mathematics and physics from William and Mary, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
