How Risa Stack Built a Career Bridging Science, Finance, and Venture Innovation

Risa Stack represents a unique archetype in the venture capital world—someone who has successfully woven together seemingly disparate career threads into a coherent investment philosophy. Today, she leads the New Business Creation team at GE Ventures, where she oversees the incubation and development of standalone ventures. Yet her path to this role was anything but conventional, beginning in academic biology and passing through the high-pressure trading floors of Chicago before landing in the world of venture-backed innovation.

The catalyst for her transformation came from an unexpected source: a book. While pursuing her Ph.D. in cell biology, Stack was simultaneously managing a trading desk on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, executing futures and options strategies on government securities. She held both roles because she was drawn to the intersection of intellectual rigor and calculated risk-taking. Reading “The Billion-Dollar Molecule: The Quest for the Perfect Drug”—the story behind Vertex’s founding—crystallized what she’d been searching for: a career that would allow her to translate scientific discovery into commercial reality. That realization led her to apply for the Kauffman Fellowship, a prestigious program that positioned her to enter venture capital through a position at JP Morgan Partners, where she helped establish their venture practice.

From Kleiner Perkins to GE Ventures: The Evolution of Risa Stack’s Investment Approach

Her decade-long tenure as a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers followed. During this period, Risa Stack accumulated extensive experience across healthcare-focused investments, holding board and observer positions in more than a dozen companies. Many of these weren’t passive investments—she actively incubated several ventures and served as interim chief executive for some, gaining operator-level experience alongside her investor perspective. That hands-on exposure proved invaluable for her eventual transition to GE Ventures, where the investment model diverges significantly from traditional venture capital practices.

At GE Ventures, Risa Stack operates within a fundamentally different framework. Rather than solely pursuing equity stakes in existing teams, the group creates businesses from the ground up, leveraging technology and capabilities housed within GE’s global operations. The team functions less like conventional venture investors and more like entrepreneurial operators themselves. On any given day, the work involves evaluating business concepts, conducting market feasibility studies, drafting comprehensive business plans, and assessing potential leaders. The objective is consistent: ensure that new ventures achieve commercial readiness before moving forward.

The Market Validation and Business Model Approach

The Risa Stack methodology for evaluating opportunities centers on three foundational questions: What genuine problem does this solve? How can we demonstrate that the solution works in the market? And is the addressable market sufficiently large to justify the investment? These aren’t rhetorical; they drive decision-making at every stage. The team typically seeds new ventures with capital up to $1 million, starting with a concept and a small founding team. They remain actively engaged through the period where business models get refined, product assumptions get validated through customer feedback, and eventually, they coordinate Series A fundraising rounds. Sometimes GE Ventures is the sole capital provider; other times, respected external investors are brought in to diversify the funding sources and increase strategic value.

Seven companies have been built and launched through this process at GE Ventures. Menlo Microsystems, for instance, emerged from technology that was spun out from GE’s research division. Avitas Systems represents another case study—it deployed GE’s Predix platform to reshape how inspection services function across oil and gas, energy, transportation, and aviation industries. Across Risa Stack’s entire investment career, her portfolio encompasses more than 20 companies, representing several hundred million dollars in total capital deployment. Many have achieved public company status.

Sourcing and Building the Right Team: Risa Stack’s Philosophy

The companies that come into existence through this platform typically originate from compelling concepts that emerge through Risa Stack’s interactions with GE stakeholders and their customers across various sectors and geographies. This embedded access creates a strategic advantage: the ventures solve real market problems because they’re informed by insider perspectives that most independent startups lack. Risa Stack gravitates toward founders with genuinely disruptive mindsets, though she recognizes a critical tension: founders must balance unwavering conviction with genuine receptiveness to counsel.

Her advice to entrepreneurs reflects hard-won experience: surround yourself with people who think differently and often bring deeper expertise than you do. Listen actively. Embrace feedback. The founder’s most critical asset throughout the company lifecycle is the team itself. Passion and commitment matter, certainly, but so does matching skill sets to the company’s current stage. A business in early product development may not need senior marketing talent yet; premature hiring for roles that become relevant only later creates inefficiency. The art lies in assembling the right combination of people at the right moment—individuals who coalesce into a unified, motivated collective with shared purpose.

This philosophy reflects Risa Stack’s own journey: someone who could have remained a particle physicist, a futures trader, or a venture capitalist in isolation, but instead recognized that the most valuable career moves come from integration, not specialization.