I Can’t Overstate the Value of a Good Board

In the 12-months, we have stood up a com­pa­ny, hired a world-class team, released an indus­try-lead­ing piece of hard­ware, and signed a term sheet to ful­ly fund our busi­ness plan. That’s the result of many fac­tors, includ­ing extra­or­di­nar­i­ly hard work by every mem­ber of our team, but there’s no way we could have come any­where close to that result with­out our board of directors.

[…]

Ira Ehren­preis is the Founder and Man­ag­ing Part­ner of DBL Part­ners; he led our Series A round. Ira has incred­i­ble hard­ware expe­ri­ence and has invest­ed in a wide range of cat­e­go­ry-defin­ing com­pa­nies, includ­ing SpaceX and
Tes­la (NASDAQ: TSLA) where he still serves on the board of directors.

I am always talk­ing with Ira. Always. He is con­stant­ly com­ing up with ideas and mak­ing intro­duc­tions; to date, he has made more than 50 and we now track Ira’s intro­duc­tions as a sep­a­rate lead source in Sales­force. He has pushed us to do things that no enter­prise com­pa­ny has done in their first year and — guess what — we did them.

Ira is also a great human being and he has ded­i­cat­ed his ven­ture cap­i­tal career to invest­ments that not only deliv­er top-tier ven­ture cap­i­tal returns but also enable social, envi­ron­men­tal, and eco­nom­ic improve­ment in the regions in which they oper­ate. He has great­ly influ­enced our own ESG efforts and our com­mit­ment as a com­pa­ny to have a pos­i­tive impact on our com­mu­ni­ty and soci­ety at large.

Pre­vi­ous to R‑Zero, I had a strong work­ing rela­tion­ship with Ira and knew he was incred­i­bly hard-work­ing and extreme­ly com­mit­ted to his com­pa­nies but those adjec­tives gross­ly under­state the impact he’s had on R‑Zero.

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