Gordon Rausser

Gordon Rausser is the Robert Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served on three separate occasions as chair of his academic department and as Dean of the College of Natural Resources for six years. He has been elected a Fellow of a number of professional associations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association. Due to his innovative research he has been the recipient of twenty-three research and instructional awards including national awards for best journal articles, research discovery, and publications of enduring quality. His government service includes, serving two years as senior economist with the Council of Economic Advisors and two years as Chief Economist at the Agency of International Development, U.S. State Department.

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Over the course of his academic career he has actively pursued a number of entrepreneurial activities. While on the faculty at Harvard University his first venture was the establishment of a futures market hedge fund. Subsequently, following his four years in Washington, D.C. he co-founded a private company, Law and Economics Consulting Group (LECG), which was taken public in 1997 on NYSE and was merged with another larger organization in 1998. He was also involved in taking a second company, U.S. Diagnostics, public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1995. He is currently the Chairman of the Board of three separate private companies and has served on the Board of Directors of three publically traded companies. In terms of previous service on the boards of private companies, with a sale of three such companies in which an earnout provision was specified, he was selected as shareholder representation to monitor and enforce the earnout financial conditions.

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He is an active investor in SunBasket, Smule, Revel Systems, Task Rabbit, Bloom Energy, Knowi, Sellpoints, MetricStream, Metricly, and Famous.