Jacques F. Vallee
serves as a General Partner of Euro-America, a Silicon Valley group that
invests in North America and Europe, primarily in high-technology. He
was born in France, where he received a B.S. in mathematics at the
Sorbonne and an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University. Coming to the
U.S. as an astronomer at the University of Texas, where he co-developed
the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA, Jacques later moved to
Northwestern University where he received
his
Ph.D. in computer science. He went on to work at SRI International and
the Institute for the Future, where he directed the project to build the
world's first network-based conferencing system as a Principal
Investigator on Arpanet, the prototype for the Internet.
A venture capitalist with
Euro-America since 1987, Jacques Vallee has served as an
early-stage investor and director of many companies including SangStat
Medical, a biotechnology firm based in Menlo Park, California and
Nantes, France; Accuray, a medical device company specialized in robotic
surgery; Ixys, a power semiconductor firm; and Ubique, Inc., a web
teleconferencing company (acquired by AOL).
Other investments that he spearheaded include Com-21, P-Com, Harmonic
Lightwaves, Isocor and Mercury Interactive, all of which made successful
IPOs on the Nasdaq market. He has also served as a director of Class
Data Systems, a networking software company (acquired by Cisco), and
Trivnet, Ltd., specialized in micropayment.
Jacques is a member of the science board for the French Genopole
investment fund, based in Evry (www.genopole.com)
specializing in life sciences and a Trustee of the Institute for the
Future (www.iftf.org).
He has contributed a "Letter from California" column for Le
Figaro, archived in the blog, (www.jacquesvallee.net/blog/blog.html).
Apart from his work with information technology and finance, Jacques
has had a long-term private interest in astronomy, in writing fiction
and in the frontiers of research, notably unidentified aerial
phenomena. He also serves on the scientific advisory board of
Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, Nevada (www.bigelowaerospace.com).
He was awarded the Jules Verne Prize in Paris for a science
fiction novel in French.
Jacques and his wife Janine live in San Francisco. They
have two children.
Note: The
distinguished Canadian astronomer named Jacques P. Vallee is not
related to the above information. He can be reached at:
www.ursi.ca/vallee/.