Leadership Highlight

Petr Johanes, PhD is an expert at the intersection of finance, psychology, and technology with extensive experience as an investor, advisor, and innovator.

As an investor, Dr. Johanes built due diligence and allocation systems for premier venture capital and impact funds in Silicon Valley, including Khosla Ventures and Uprising Ventures. While at the World Bank, Dr. Johanes analyzed big data and designed mathematical models to allocate a country’s GDP percentage to develop its infrastructure and economy over a 20-year period. Dr. Johanes co-founded his family’s family office alongside his brother and father and led his family’s venture capital and impact investing in the U.S. and Europe. Dr. Johanes has deep expertise investing into frontier technology (AI, nanotechnology, energy), finance technology, and energy infrastructure.

As an advisor, Dr. Johanes has 15+ cumulative years of experience serving on Boards of private tech and finance companies and 10+ years of experience mentoring investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers. Dr. Johanes founded his own financial advisory company, Empowering Prosperity Solutions, which supports family offices, private funds, foundations, and private technology companies with investing, fundraising, strategic decision-making, and leadership development. Dr. Johanes led multiple high-stakes venture turnarounds, full-spectrum investment operations implementations, and complex fundraises in the U.S. and Europe.

As an innovator, Dr. Johanes  has conducted pioneering research, built brand-new technologies, and taught innovative courses in both academic and corporate environments. While a researcher at Stanford, Dr. Johanes directly contributed to the birth of new sub-fields of scholarly research in materials science, education, and philosophy and AI. For two years, Dr. Johanes ran the interdisciplinary Stanford Learning Analytics (Lytics) lab. Dr. Johanes co-created and taught over half a dozen courses at Stanford across three different Schools, including nanomaterial thermodynamics, AI-driven education technology design, and venture investing and entrepreneurship. Dr. Johanes contributed one of the four integral pillars of the futuristic Stanford 2025 project, which imagined bold visions of higher education. Dr. Johanes has experience building AI and big data infrastructure, digital education products, and energy technologies.

Dr. Johanes is a graduate of the Stanford University, where he earned Bachelors and Masters degrees from the School of Engineering and a Doctorate degree from the Graduate School of Education. Dr. Johanes has received multiple awards for his engineering, researching, teaching, and storytelling, including Stanford’s highest teaching award.