Trousdale Ventures Team

With backgrounds in private equity, venture capital, business strategy, and entrepreneurship, the Trousdale Ventures team brings their unique perspectives to building successful growth and startup companies. The founders and partners, based in Los Angeles and Austin, are focused on providing revenue growth, risk management, and strategic advisory support for portfolio companies.

Founder & Partner

Phillip Sarofim

Phillip Sarofim is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Trousdale Ventures, LLC. A noted businessman, entrepreneur, philanthropist, patron of the arts and historic automobile enthusiast, Sarofim has built a portfolio that encompasses a wide array of companies at the leading-edge of technology, medicine, clean energy, media and consumer products.

Sarofim established Trousdale Ventures with an extensive background in corporate investment, business development and mergers & acquisitions, and takes an active role in helping grow portfolio companies as an Advisory Board or Board of Directors member.

Sarofim serves as a member of the Board of Directors for several Trousdale Ventures portfolio companies, including Yellowbird Foods, SkinTe, Super Coffee, Passport Foods, Good Shepherd and Glas. At the same time, Sarofim is a member of the Advisory Boards for Trousdale Venture companies EQTainment and Ostendo, and serves on the Advisory Boards of Unicorn Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on providing seed funding to early-to-mid stage companies.

A stage 2 Hodgkin lymphoma survivor, Sarofim joined with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), to launch the Phillip Sarofim Scholarship Endowment, established to award undergraduate scholarships with a preference for students battling or in remission from cancer. Underscoring his commitment to community involvement, Sarofim is a founding member of the Petersen Museum and donates his time as a member of the Board of Directors for the Houston Police Foundation, Houston’s Alley Theater and Emancipation Park.

Phillip attended Rice University.

Managing Director of Trousdale Venture Partners

Brian Grigsby

Brian Grigsby is Managing Director of Trousdale Venture Partners. With more than 25 years’ experience as a venture capital investor, he has a wealth of knowledge in early stage finance and business development, especially in the technology sector. Brian is also the CEO/CFO of Good Shepherd, a Netherlands-based video game publishing and finance company, as well as being the Managing Partner of Corsa Ventures, a Texas- based early stage venture capital firm he founded in 2012.

Other notable businesses Brian has founded include Raven Venture Partners, a (2009) early-stage pledge fund specializing in financing digital entertainment, software and e- commerce businesses and the video game publishing company GHI Media (2008), which now operates as Devolver Digital and has become one of the world’s largest independent video game publishers.

During the past two decades Brian has also co-founded or invested in numerous venture-backed endeavors with exits to Fortune 100 companies – including IBM, Motorola, Applied Materials and Salesforce. He is currently an active investor and board member in more than 20 companies, ranging from Texas-based custom motorcycle builder Revival Cycles to leading condiment producer Yellow Bird Sauce and software marketing performance manager Hive9.

With undergraduate engineering & physics and Masters of Science degrees from the University of Oklahoma, Brian’s early career path took him to the professional and consumer audio world and then to NASA’a Johnson Space Centre where he worked on the post-Challenger Shuttle re-launch program.

Raised in Texas and a long-time resident of Austin, Brian treasures the outdoors – be it boating with his three children, paddle boarding or racing in the Sports Car Club of America’s Club Racing Series, he lives a very active life and enjoys every minute of it.

Co-Managing Partner, Unicorn Ventures

Dave Lin

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Dave Lin has a distinguished career in entrepreneurship, operations, finance, and investing in venture-backed companies. He has served as managing partner of Lin Ventures, where he represented clients and investments such as Ad Hoc Labs, eSalon, PPG Industries, and Slack. Prior to Lin Ventures, he held operational CFO, senior management, and lead investor positions with companies including Maker Studios, OfferBuys.com, Upfront Ventures (formerly GRP Partners), PriceGrabber, Experian, Montgomery & Co., and UBS. Mr. Lin graduated from UCLA and received his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Co-Managing Partner, Unicorn Ventures

Jonathan Hung

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Jonathan Hung has an extensive background in operations management, finance, business strategy and development, entrepreneurship, and data analysis. As president of United Overseas Textile Corporation, Mr. Hung played a pivotal role in establishing the global business as a leader in apparel design and manufacturing. While in the role, he partnered with retailers such as Amazon, Burlington, and Costco. Mr. Hung is also the co-founder and chief operating officer of Legacy Pioneers, a technology company dedicated to building the next generation of leaders by providing families with education, training, and mentoring. Mr. Hung holds degrees from the University of Southern California, London School of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Partner

Patrick O’Reilly

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A recognized technology strategist and serial entrepreneur, Patrick O’Reilly serves as founder-CEO and chairman of the board for Get Cloud Native, a Trousdale Ventures portfolio company that specializes in migrating large enterprise clients to cloud platforms. Noted for his efforts in helping establish the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Mr. O’Reilly previously served in the Office of CTO Cloud Computing for Cisco following senior-level technology posts with Mesosphere, Wikimedia Foundation, OmniTi, Schematic, and Media Revolution.