Laurie Yoler

Laurie Yoler is an experienced board director, venture capital investor, and strategist skilled at advising companies and founders in imagining, building, and scaling disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, automation, and logistics. She is savvy in fundraising, M&A strategy and negotiations, cybersecurity oversight, and in devising complex, unconventional strategic alliances.

Yoler has served on over 25 boards of public, private and non-profit organizations. Most notably, she served as a Founding Board Member of Tesla, serving on the board of directors from the earliest days, and on the board of advisors through taking the company public. She also served on the board of Interactive Investor International in London, through taking the company public, and until its acquisition by AMP Bank.

She currently serves on the board of directors of Church & Dwight (NYSE:CHD) and the National Association of Corporate Directors Northern California, and on the advisory boards of Aptiv, Accenture, Platform Science, TTI/Vanguard, and AI4All. She is also a Partner with early-stage deep-tech venture capital firm Playground Global, as well as an investor with Broadway Angels and HealthTech Capital.

Yoler has been an integral part of the development and launch of many new innovations and products, both from within large companies like Qualcomm, Visa, Sun Microsystems, and Accenture, and as one of a small group of founders/investors of a new entrepreneurial venture with a radical idea like Tesla, DNA Direct, Zoox, and Packet Design.

From 2013-2016, Yoler was President of Qualcomm Labs and SVP of Business Development for Qualcomm, driving new internal innovation, and exploring and closing new strategic partnerships and joint ventures. Previously, Yoler was a founding managing director at GrowthPoint Technology Partners, an investment bank advising entrepreneurs in building strategic alliances, completing M&A transactions and raising capital.

Yoler graduated summa cum laude from Washington State University with a bachelor’s degree in management information systems. She completed a semester in the international business program at the University of Copenhagen and completed executive management programs at Kellogg, Stanford and INSEAD. In 2019, she was awarded a CERT certificate in Cybersecurity Oversight. Yoler has been very active in continuing her education at Stanford in board governance, biotechnology, biochemistry, neuropsychology, neuroscience and geology. She also lectures in the Engineering, Law and Business Schools at Stanford.