Brian Frank
General Partner

Brian is the Founder and General Partner of FTW Ventures. He is experienced in both Technology & Food, and understands the complexity of running startups at the intersection of these two, challenging spaces.

Prior to founding FTW, Brian led 3 venture-backed businesses to successful exits and directed innovative products in communication, mobile, social & AI/ML for both startups & Fortune 500 Companies over his 20+ year career.

Jenn Burka
Investor

Jenn is an Investor at FTW Ventures, where she is focused on opportunities related to Climate Solutions, Sustainable Packaging, and innovation in Health and Wellness.

Prior to joining FTW, she was a Senior Associate at Evolv Ventures, Kraft Heinz's $100M corporate venture capital fund, where she focused on Food Tech, Sustainability, and Packaging.

She is a 2021 graduate from the Yale School of Management where she led initiatives on impact investing, venture capital, and entrepreneurship in the sustainable food/agriculture industry with time spent at a variety of venture firms including Equal Ventures, AmplifyHER Ventures, and as a founding partner of Fishbowl Ventures, Yale SOM’s first student run impact fund.

Jenn has always been food motivated: she ran the culinary entertainment department on-board Holland America Line cruise ships before moving to New York City to work for the Marcus Samuelsson Group, a celebrity chef driven media and restaurant group. In her free time, you can find Jenn hosting overly elaborate dinner parties or finding a mountain to hike in the northeast, where she currently resides with her 40+ houseplants.

Tawny Scanlan
Investor

Tawny serves as an FTW Ventures Associate, focused on Life Science investment opportunities for Food & Ag.

Tawny originally joined FTW through the IIFH Fellowship program at UC Davis, where she did her graduate studies in Animal Biology, focused on Sustainable Aquaculture. 

She conducts research, outreach, and diligence for the FTW Ventures Life Sciences initiatives, as well as structures our deal process and network outreach leveraging an extensive, proprietary FTW Ventures Deal Database she designed.

NorthMountain Fund Services
Fund Administration

Min Ma and Ni Yan of NorthMountain have deep experience with in-house fund administration, providing portfolio company tracking, performance analysis, company valuation, fund accounting, and reporting. Collectively they’ve worked with over 100 entities including VCs, PEs, fund-of-funds, CVCs and hedge funds

Cooley LLP
Fund Formation

Cooley provides world-class fund formation, with broader industry-leading legal services for VCs, high-growth startups, M&A transactions, and the life science & biotech sectors amongst many other categories.