Neal Hansch has quietly been named the new CEO and managing partner of Sherpa Foundry, a San Francisco-based group founded in 2013 to help bridge the digital divide between older companies and tech startups. Its founding corporate partners are Condé Nast, DreamWorks (DWA), eBay (EBAY) and Salesforce.com (CRM).
He succeeds founding Sherpa Foundry CEO Tina Sharkey, the former BabyCenter and AOL executive who will remain as a Sherpa Foundry partner. She also is incubating a stealth consumer startup called Dhosi.
“We’ve had four great founding members, and I felt it was time to scale up Foundry and open it up to other large, global public companies,” Sharkey explains. “So that’s what we recruited Neal to do.”
Hansch has spent the past two years as managing director of an incubator program affiliated with the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology. Before that he spent nearly eight years as a general partner with VC and private equity firm Rustic Canyon Partners, and also co-founded WebAssist.
Sherpa Foundry is affiliated with venture capital firm Sherpa Capital, which was co-founded by Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford. Its portfolio companies include Airbnb, Uber, Hyperloop and PillPack.