Alan Gershenfeld
Alan Gershenfeld has spent the last twenty years at The Intersection of entertainment, technology and social entrepreneurship. He is currently Co-Founder and Managing Partner of E-Line Ventures, a ‘double bottom line’ early-stage venture fund focused on empowering individuals, small businesses and disenfranchised communities through innovative uses of personal fabrication, digital media and on-demand business services.
Prior to E-Line, Alan spent seven years as CEO and Co-Founder of netomat, a leader in mobile-web community solutions. As CEO, Alan helped to transform a network-based art project into a pioneering software company, raising funding from VCs, Strategic Investors (Motorola, WPP, Forbes), and Foundations (Rockefeller’s ProVenEx double bottom line fund). netomat was recently named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Before co-founding netomat, Alan spent six years at Activision, an entertainment software leader. He was part of the management team that helped rebuild the company from a fledgling business, recently emerged from bankruptcy, into an industry powerhouse with revenues over a billion dollars. As Senior Vice President, Alan oversaw all product development at the company's Los Angeles studios as well as product development, technology, quality assurance and customer support. Titles released under Alan's leadership include Civilization: Call to Power, Asteroids, Spycraft, Muppet Treasure Island, Pitfall, Zork and Tony Hawk Skateboarding.
Before Activision, Alan spent nearly a decade in the film industry where he worked in development, production and post-production capacities with credits on films such as Waiting for the Light, To Sleep With Anger, Reversal of Fortune and [...] and directed the award-winning documentary The Expatriates.
As a writer, Alan was a film critic for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and co-author of Game Plan, a book about the computer and video game business published by St. Martin's Press. His articles and photographs have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema India-International and Bowler’s Journal.
Alan currently serves on the Board of Directors of FilmAid International, which screens films for refugees and displaced people throughout the world, Games4Change which enables social change through computer and video games and Sustainable South Bronx, which drives environmental justice through economically sustainable projects. Alan serves on the Advisory Board of Scenarios USA, Personal Technology Solutions, netomat and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center For Educational Media and Research (Sesame Workshop).
Alan is also the brother of Neil Gershenfeld, Director of The Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT.