Jason is a Founding Partner Emeritus of Foundry Group and retired in 2020. He spent over two decades in the venture capital and technology industries in a multitude of investing, founding, operational and engineering roles.
Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Jason was a co-founder of SRS Acquiom, which delivers a comprehensive platform of financial products and services to help M&A deal parties efficiently manage escrows, payments, risk, documents and claims. SRS has completed over $200 billion in merger transactions as escrow agents, payments administrators, shareholder representatives and insurers.
Prior to co-founding SRS, Jason was a Managing Director and General Counsel for Mobius Venture Capital, where he also acted as its chief administrative partner overseeing all operations of the firm. During this time, Jason led fund formation activities and assisted portfolio companies with challenges dealing with high-stakes litigation, securities, employment, regulatory and intellectual property law.
Prior to his involvement with Mobius Venture Capital, Jason was an attorney with Cooley LLP, where he practiced corporate and securities law with an emphasis on representation of emerging companies in private and public financings, mergers and acquisitions.
Before his legal career, Jason was a senior consultant and software engineer at Accenture where he focused on financial institution re-engineering engagements. While at Accenture, Jason supervised programming teams up to forty people in size and was responsible for managing deliverables in multi-billion dollar engagements.
As one of the first full-time, in-house general counsels at a venture capital firm, Jason was on the forefront of thought leadership and co-chaired the National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) General Counsel group and was an active participant on the NVCA’s Chief Financial Officer group. He was one of the key draftspersons for the NVCA model document task force which created the industry’s first set of standardized venture capital financing documents, which greatly aided in the efficiency of completing these types of deals. He served on the board of the NVCA, including as an executive board member, from 2009-2013.
Jason holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, with distinction and a Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from the University of Michigan. He is an active musician playing drums and singing with his band Legitimate Front, with his partner Ryan McIntyre, and enjoys home remodeling and travel. He also co-authored the best selling book Venture Deals – be smarter than your lawyer and your venture capitalist. Jason is also proud to be an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado for the past decade. He serves as the Chair of the Entrepreneurial Initiative Advisory Board and as a Senior Fellow at Silicon Flatirons. You can find him on Twitter: @jasonmendelson.
