Roy Bahat

Roy Bahat (@roybahat) is the head of Bloomberg Beta, a venture fund backed by Bloomberg L.P. that invests in companies that make business work better. Bloomberg Beta has an unusual model for a corporate-backed venture fund. It invests for financial return and strives to work in the same new ways as startups who define the future of work -- transparent (with its full operating manual open sourced at http://bloombergbeta.com) and driven by data (with a program to statistically predict who will start companies in the future). Roy has spent time making startups, as a corporate executive, in government, media, and academia -- and is one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business. He was the founding chairman of OUYA, a Kickstarter-backed game console company acquired by Razer. For five years, he ran News Corporation’s IGN Entertainment, where he hired software engineers without looking at their resumes, and was in the office of News Corp.’s chairman. Before that, Roy was in government in the office of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and was a short-lived consultant at McKinsey & Co. Today, he is on the faculty at U.C. Berkeley where he teaches about media at the Haas School of Business. He serves on the boards of CodeNow, a nonprofit teaching technology skills to underprivileged students, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit newsroom. Roy graduated from Harvard College, where he ran the student public service nonprofit. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He shares what he’s learning at http://also.roybahat.com.