Lucien Ruby

For over 30 years, Lucien has focused on start-up and development stage companies, serving as an entrepreneur, turnaround CEO, teacher, researcher, consultant, board member and venture capitalist. Lucien is the co-founder of Quest Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specializing in seed-stage opportunities that co-founded over 25 companies, primarily technology startups. Lucien was a co-founder and for two years a Managing Director of Crown Advisors, a $100,000,000 fund investing in late stage private companies and micro- cap public securities. Prior to forming Quest Ventures, Lucien was a principal at Brentwood Associates in Los Angeles where he served on several Boards of Directors, including both software and hardware companies in the early stage of their development.

During his venture capital career, Lucien has been involved in over 150 venture investments. Of these, in 83 cases he either located and sourced or managed the due diligence process or was the primary monitor or was solely and completely responsible for the investment. Of these 83 deals, 40 have exited for gains, 25 were written off completely, six were sold for partial losses, and 12 are on-going. Of the 40 that have exited for gains, seven returned 10 or more times the investment, seven returned between six and ten times the investment, four returned between four and six times the investment, ten between three and four times the investment, and 12 returned between one and three times the investment. Of the 71 investments that have reached some form of conclusion, 56% achieved a positive result, a performance better than twice that of the industry average 25%. Currently all but one of his 12 on-going investments appears likely to achieve a positive return.

For several years, Lucien taught the course on Seed and Early Stage Investing as well as a course on Monitoring Venture Investments at the Venture Capital Institute ("VCI"), the industry training college sponsored by the National Venture Capital Association and the National Association of Small Business Investment Companies. He was a member of the faculty of VCI's first Asian program presented in Singapore, and subsequently in China, teaching start-ups, turnarounds, and monitoring start-up operations. Lucien has also been a guest lecturer on small company strategy at Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration, was a guest lecturer on venture capital at Hastings Law School, and for several years lectured on technology commercialization at the Engineering School of the University of California at Berkeley and on private company issues at the University of San Francisco School of Law. For two years, Lucien taught finance at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

Prior to entering the venture capital industry, Lucien was a consultant for the Strategic Planning Institute in Cambridge, MA, leading the Start-Up Business Project of the PIMS Program, a pioneering, empirically based research and consulting firm. In his early career, Lucien was an engineer and entrepreneur.

Lucien has a B.S.C.E. from Duke University and a MBA from Harvard University. Upon graduation from Duke, Lucien worked as a field engineer in the Republic of South Vietnam where he received a Special Letter of Commendation for Contributions Under Special Circumstances.

Currently, Lucien serves on the board of directors of Lexicon, a nationally known specialist in branding, identification, and naming, and on the board of Capton, a provider of liquor monitoring systems to the hospitality industry. He is a Regional Partner of PEI Funds, an investment fund specializing in purchase of secondary venture capital and buyout fund limited partnership interests and in acquisition of late stage venture and buyout portfolios.