Yale School of Management - Nancy Pfund '82

"I came to Yale SOM believing that the world would be a better place if people from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors substituted their stereotypes of one another with more real-world collaboration. Yale SOM reinforced this belief with the tools, the case studies, and the camaraderie to give me the confidence to pursue a career that has crossed and combined these three sectors. Along the way, I have been through the highs and lows any career brings, but have always been privileged to try to build upon the pursuit of business and social innovation for which Yale SOM prepared us all so well."

Nancy Pfund is a managing partner of DBL Investors. DBL Investors is a venture capital firm whose goal is to combine top-tier financial returns with meaningful social, economic and environmental returns in the regions in which it invests. Ms. Pfund currently sponsors or sits on the board of directors of a number of private companies, including Tesla Motors, Pandora Media, BrightSource Energy, Solar City and Solaria.

Previously, Ms. Pfund was a managing director at JPMorgan. Ms. Pfund joined JPMorgan (then Hambrecht & Quist) in 1984 as a securities analyst and later joined its venture capital department as principal and then managing director. In addition to her private equity responsibilities, Ms. Pfund also built and directed H&Q's external affairs and philanthropic programs from 1996 to 2001. In 1988, President Bush appointed Ms. Pfund as a charter member of the National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology. In 1999, Ms. Pfund was appointed by President Clinton to serve on the Congressional Web-Based Education Commission. Ms. Pfund is a member of the board of directors of the California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF), a not-for-profit fund mandated by the California PUC to invest in companies pursuing alternatives to a fossil-fuel dominated economy, and is a founding officer and director of ABC2, a foundation aimed at accelerating a cure for brain cancer. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the UC Davis Center for Energy Efficiency. She speaks regularly on cleantech investing and policy as well as mission-related investing.

Prior to joining JPMorgan, Ms. Pfund worked at Intel Corporation, Stanford University, the State of California, and the Sierra Club. Ms. Pfund received her BA and MA in anthropology from Stanford University, and her MBA from the Yale School of Management. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and their two children.