Welcoming Chief Legal Officer Ryan Ward to DCVC

I am excited to announce that Ryan Ward has joined DCVC as Chief Legal Officer. Ryan was most recently General Counsel at Andreessen Horowitz spanning an eight-year period of their rapid growth and in the venture capital industry at large.

In Ryan, DCVC is gaining a leader in the venture-capital legal community, whose background will help us approach our most compelling oppor­tu­ni­ties and significant challenges with the clarity derived from having seen our industry from many important angles. His passion for Deep Tech and expertise in working with the founders of complex, science-based companies makes Ryan an ideal fit for the DCVC team.

During his tenure at a16z, Ryan helped them expand into investing in new areas to the firm such as biotech and cryp­tocur­rency, and built a legal team to address the increased scale and complexity of managing over $30 billion in assets. Ryan led legal and cross-disci­pli­nary teams to coordinate deal and company activities to help a16z scale, while advising on complex and novel legal issues as the firm invested in crypto, growth, and other frontier domains.

Prior to a16z, Ryan was an attorney at Cooley, advising venture capital firms and companies at every stage of growth. In addition, Ryan has personal experience of the rigors of management at Deep Tech ventures, having served as an in-house counsel at two public biotech companies. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

For over a dozen years, DCVC has backed entre­pre­neurs using Deep Tech to solve urgent trillion-dollar problems in global industries ripe for tech­no­log­ical progress, and we’re excited for Ryan to join us on this mission. The breadth of our investments in climate tech, compu­ta­tional biology, and industrial trans­for­ma­tion, and our ambition to do more in the future, demands extensive expertise working with Deep Tech companies and experience scaling a venture firm. Ryan will lead our legal strategy as we enter the next phase of DCVC’s growth and engage with an expanding variety of founders and companies.

I look forward to Ryan becoming a strategic counsel to DCVC and helping our growing family of portfolio companies.

Spencer Punter is COO/CFO and a Partner at DCVC