Dan Goodman
Managing General Partner
Dan Goodman is a technology commercialization expert and lifelong serial entrepreneur, having founded or co-founded 16 companies since 1970. As a consultant, advisor, mentor, and board director, he has spent decades helping other entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 intrapreneurs become more successful.
His enduring passion for sustainability and environmental stewardship began in the mid 1970’s when he built a methane bioreactor utilizing canine waste feedstock. Dan later founded a biodiesel manufacturing company, created a renewable energy themed STEM education non-profit, developed and hosted the Maryland Clean Energy Today podcast, drafted renewable energy standards legislation for county government, testified before the Maryland state legislature on electricity net-metering legislation, lobbied the U.S. Congress on the 2005 Energy Bill, and served as the gubernatorially-appointed vice chairman and treasurer of Maryland’s clean energy economic development authority and the chairman of the state’s clean energy business incubator. He currently serves on the investment advisory board of the Chesapeake Bay Seed Capital Fund, an environmentally-focused early-stage fund capitalized by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
Dan has served as an expert reviewer for multi-million dollar energy and climate technology grant proposals for the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Advanced Technology program and Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, as well as the federal government’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s energy technology patent portfolio.
He is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), where he mentors deep climatetech startups for New York State and global incubators, accelerators, and venture competitions including Venture for ClimateTech, Carbon to Value, the Urban Future Prize, the Canadian government’s Canadian Technology Accelerator, and the UK’s Global Innovation Programme. Dan has also mentored deeptech entrepreneurs in accelerators for TechStars, Uptake Alliance, the U.S. Army, NASA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the National Security Innovation Network.
Among Dan’s roles in academia, he has served as Technology Commercialization Fellow, Senior Fellow for Renewable Energy, Entrepreneur-in-Residence Emeritus, and MBA entrepreneurship lecturer at the University of Maryland’s R.H. Smith School of Business; board member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering; Entrepreneur-in-Residence at UMaryland’s Office of Technology Commercialization; Executive-in-Residence at Columbia University’s Technology Ventures office, helping faculty researchers commercialize their physical sciences and climatetech inventions; and Mentor and Advisor to MIT’s Proto Ventures fusion and energy -focused venture studio.
Dan holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and has done graduate work in Technology Transfer at the National Institutes of Health’s Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences.