Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Convertible Note,Early stage Venture,Late Stage Venture,Seed,Venture

Lorenzo Thione is the co-founder of Powerset, Inc., an innovative search startup founded in 2005, with the vision of bringing to consumers a more natural and effective type of Internet search than conventional keyword search. Funded by notable Silicon Valley VCs and angel investors, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2008 to complement and innovate on its own search technology and offering. Currently, he is a Principal Program Manager in charge of the Powerset division of Bing, Microsoft's innovative "Decision Engine".

Lorenzo is an active angel investor, board member and advisor in several startup, including Dolores Labs, an exciting and energetic San Francisco startup building a scalable platform for human-based computing and crowdsourcing, Crowdflower, and several others at various stages, in the US and abroad, like Kidlandia, Etacts, 8Coupons, and iBrii.

In addition to his Internet-tech endeavors, Lorenzo is a theater producer currently busy in bringing several new works to the Broadway stage, including the recently emerging Green Day musical, American Idiot of which he's Associate Producer. His current and most ambitious project is a brand new musical bound for the Broadway stage. Jay Kuo's original musical Allegiance, starring George Takei and Lea Salonga, follows the story of a Japanese American family during the years of the WWII Japanese American internment, and is currently aiming for a 2012 Broadway debut.

Lorenzo is a founding board member of StartOut (www.startout.org), a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering and developing entrepreneurship within the LGBT community, and during his service on the board of StartOut, the non-profit, founded in 2009, has grown to a membership of over 1000 individuals nationwide and three active chapters in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with plans for faster growth. He serves on the board of trustees of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and Reason To Party, a SF-based non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of underserved Bay Area residents by raising money for charity groups through events held in collaboration with local businesses.

A native of Milan, Italy, Lorenzo moved to Austin, Texas at age 21, to complete his studies at the University of Texas at Austin, from which he holds a M.S. in Computer Engineering, and has co-authored several publications in Software Engineering and Computational Linguistics. He is a named inventor on 10 issued and over 20 pending patents in the US and world-wide.