Lucas Nelson is a managing director at Lytical Ventures, a Corporate Intelligence focused early stage venture fund. He focuses on cybersecurity, crypto currencies, and enterprise application technologies and brings over two decades of investment, operational and entrepreneurial experience to his role.
Lucas is a proud geek; a hacker turned VC. He brings a unique mix of technical depth and business knowledge to bear when Lytical works with a company and is excited by companies that are trying to use technology to make a dent in the universe.
In the year prior to joining Lytical Ventures, Lucas was a principal at Evolution Equity, an international venture capital investor leveraging deep sector expertise to help exceptional entrepreneurs develop market-leading companies. The firm has a focus on cyber-security, enterprise software and consumer related opportunities and brings significant resources to companies seeking to expand in international markets.
Before Evolution, Lucas spent over 5 years with DFJ Gotham, an early stage technology investor focused on the New York ecosystem. While at Gotham Ventures Lucas sat on the board of Adstruc, Verterra, and Widetronix and was a board observer of Yipit Data and StellaService.
Prior to working as a venture investor Lucas held several operational security roles at companies including Adobe and Symantec. He worked as a penetration tester, legally breaking into computers, and a security consultant helping banks and technology companies secure their applications and networks.
He started his career at a series of startups, each of which was acquired.
Lucas co-authored The Art of Software Security Testing and chaired DefCon – the largest hacking convention in the US – for 10 years. He has been a member of the NY tech community since 1999. He is also an adjunct professor at NYU teaching the class “Entrepreneurship for Hackers”, and is a mentor at Singularity University.
Lucas received a B.S. in computer science from Purdue University and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Lucas is a is a Kauffman Fellow and sits on the NJ EDC Venture Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of Health Assessment Labs, an organization whose goal to advance the state-of-the-art tools for monitoring health care services and health outcomes from the patient / consumer point of view.
Lucas lives in Queens with his wife Jeannie and their son Milo. He is also world ranked pinball player and still manages to code once in a while.
