Peter Barrett is a Founding Partner and CTO at Playground Global. He is constantly honing his deep technical skillset, making himself an invaluable resource for Playground’s portfolio companies. After co-founding Rocket Science Games, Peter spent 15 years between WebTV and Microsoft TV where he drove significant advances in video coding, advertising, TV browsing, and mobile communications. He reunited with founding members of the Playground team while serving as CTO of CloudCar, and together they formed the thriving VC firm as it stands today.
Full Biography
Peter Barrett is a Founding Partner and CTO at Playground Global. He is constantly honing his deep technical skillset, making himself an invaluable resource for Playground’s portfolio companies. After co-founding Rocket Science Games, Peter spent 15 years between WebTV and Microsoft TV where he drove significant advances in video coding, advertising, TV browsing, and mobile communications. He reunited with founding members of the Playground team while serving as CTO of CloudCar, and together they formed the thriving VC firm as it stands today.
Jory Bell is a General Partner at Playground Global, having previously served as Vice President at the firm for three years. Jory sourced some of the firm’s earliest successful investments (e.g., Nervana Systems) and he leads the firm’s investment efforts in several deep tech areas including advanced manufacturing, aerospace, genomics and synthetic/computational biology. Presently, he sits on the boards of Velo3D, Relativity Space, Strand Therapeutics and a stealth genomics company.
Matt Hershenson is a Founding Partner at Playground Global and epitomizes the firm’s comfort with operating somewhere between improbable and impossible. Previously. he co-founded Danger, a consumer smartphone company best known for creating the T-Mobile Sidekick. Hershenson has also held positions on Google’s Android team, as well as at Microsoft, Philips Semiconductor, and Apple.
Bruce Leak is a Founding Partner at Playground Global. From an early age, his intellectual curiosity led to a fascination with computers and emerging technology, and later informed his career path which took him from the frontier of Apple and Microsoft, to entrepreneurship, to his time at Playground investing in challenging ideas with the potential to leave a multi-generational impact.
Laurie Yoler is a Partner at Playground Global. An ambitious problem-solver and prolific connector by nature, Laurie has decades of experience operating, scaling, and advising companies from seed startups to multinational corporations, including Tesla, Accenture, PwC, Visa, Sun Microsystems, Packet Design, Qualcomm, and GrowthPoint Technology Partners. She sits on several noteworthy boards including Bose, Church & Dwight, and Zoox, while passionately continuing her education and guest lecturing at Stanford.
Allison Braley is an operating partner focused on marketing at Playground Global, bringing nearly 20 years of marketing, brand-building and communications expertise to the firm and its portfolio. Prior to joining Playground, Allison was head of marketing for Canvas, a Ford-owned car subscription company that was acquired by Fair in late 2019, where she then served as VP of Marketing. Allison resides in San Francisco's Outer Sunset neighborhood with her partner and two children.
What philosophy or vision guides your work?
I want to learn about anything and everything!
Sasha Ostojic is an Operating Partner at Playground Global where he works with portfolio companies on defining and executing technology and business strategies. He’s led and scaled engineering teams at Cruise Automation, Nvidia, Ultimate Technology, IBM and General Electric, driving revenue growth and product breakthroughs at every stop. Sasha sits on the advisory boards of Samsung Electronics, Zoox, Deepen AI, Cognomotiv and HTEC.
Say there are 3 people in the world who are the experts on a certain technology, well all of them are sitting here at Playground.Alex Teichman CEO & Co-founder, Lighthouse AI
Mel Sezto is an Operating Partner at Playground Global, responsible for the firm’s talent network and assisting with talent acquisition on behalf of Playground and it’s portfolio companies. She helps meld Playground’s infrastructure into one that will continue to scale by identifying partners, executive talent, and diving in on projects within its portfolio. Mel formerly led recruiting, talent acquisition and people operations at Google, Google X, Greylock Partners, and Udacity.
Sandy Taylor is the CFO for Playground Global. An entrepreneurial-minded finance executive with decades of startup experience, Sandy brings her passion for building high-performance teams and leading organizations through significant growth to the Playground ecosystem. With stops at Mocana, PayPal, Danger, Inc., Oracle, and more, Sandy is a guiding force for companies of all stages and sizes.
