Shelley Alger

Consultant

Shelley Alger brings over 25 years of business development, operations, investor relations, strategic growth and marketing experience within the startup ecosystem since the late 90s. She was the first employee and ran business development and M&A for Critical Path, the first company to commercialize SaaS. Shelley evangelized this model and sales that led to hyper growth, culminating in an expansion to 1400 employees and a $3B+ IPO market cap within three and half years. Shelley was the second woman to join the Keiretsu Forum, the world’s largest angel investing network. A passion of Shelley’s is to educate and empower women on investing for financial autonomy and independence. Shelley later co-founded a spirits import business that expanded into 27 states, that went on to produce Trader Joe’s products. Upon meeting a world-class food scientist, the spirits business company pivoted to becoming a food technology company, Treasure8. Treasure8 patented a unique food drying technology and partnered with the USDA, Google, UC. Davis, Stanford and MIT. Shelley oversaw compliance, finance, investor relations and operations for both companies. Shelley exited at the Series A at $30M valuation. She then went on to co-found and act as VP of Marketing for CXO Nexus, an AI and Machine Learning SaaS tool that optimizes vendor spend data into actionable insights for the enterprise. She left after fully vesting to pursue her interests in venture capital investing, to become a Senior Partner at Seed Milestone Fund, a. $50M seed-stage venture firm focusing on tech innovation for the Production Economy (manufacturing, logistics, supply chain). Shelley has served on leadership teams as well as non-profit boards. She is an advisor to multiple early-stage and social impact companies such as Stasher, Boomity, Change Finance, and EFD, as well as an angel investor. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and has traveled to 80 countries as an award-winning wildlife, culture and nature photographer; she features her Fine Artwork that “Celebrates the Endangered Wisdom of the Planet” at www.shelleyalger.com. Shelley received her MBA in the first MBA program focused on Sustainability from Dominican University and received her B.A. from UCLA.