Ed Niehaus

After four years as a VC and angel investor, Ed Niehaus has returned to marketing consulting. Ed joined Cypress Ventures in 2003 and was a GP there until early 2006. Prior to Cypress, as an angel venture capitalist, Ed co-founded Freedom Technology Ventures, serving as an investor, board member and active advisor to nanotechnology and software startups. He remains on the board of directors of Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and is a board observer for Socialtext. In the past he has served on the boards of ClickAction, (NASDAQ: CLAC), Avinon and Bio Quiddity. 

Ed co-founded the Nanotechnology Opportunity Report™ (NOR), sold to the London based publisher Cientifica. He serves on NOR’s advisory board, and on the advisory boards of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and the Software Development Forum, and he is a director of the Foresight Institute.
 
Previously, Ed was CEO of Niehaus Ryan Wong, Inc., the public relations agency that helped many companies. NRW did its best-known work for Apple (launched comeback, Powerbook & iMac), VeriSign (launched company), Yahoo (first five years) and Pixar (movie launches, Academy Award campaign).

As CEO, Ed played a key role in bootstrapping the agency from a DBA to a nearly $20M company with offices in SF, NY and Austin. The agency won many awards while working for such clients as B of A, Cantor-Fitzgerald, Cognos, Compuware, Documentum, eLoan, IBM, Interwoven, Motley Fool, NetFlix, NeXT, Nordstrom.com, Novell, O’Reilly Assoc. (GNN), Organic Online, PGP, Scient, SGI, Viant, Vignette and Wine.com.

Ed led the development of NRW’s Architecture of Identity strategic branding process, which many of the agency’s clients engaged, resulting in a clear and actionable definition of their companies’ vision, positioning and voice (and significant revenue for NRW).
Prior to NRW, Ed served in a several marketing, sales and engineering capacities. Ed has a BSME degree from Duke University and is a licensed professional engineer. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and three children.