Ernestine Fu Mak

Ernestine Fu Mak is a Venture Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, where she has guided founders as they navigate the journey to product-market fit and scale their businesses and teams. To develop an investment thesis on commercializing university research, she led the firm’s campus associate program, recruiting talent from institutions such as UC Berkeley and UT Austin. She served as Executive Chairman of portfolio company Gfycat, where she led strategic decisions from its incorporation and growth to 200 million monthly active users through its acquisition by Snap.

Alongside her role at Alsop Louie Partners, she is the Founder and Managing Partner of Brave Capital. Over the past decade, she has worked across the startup ecosystem—negotiating mergers and acquisitions, organizing SPVs for later-stage companies, angel investing in and advising startups that have since been acquired, and advising banks on venture debt. She was recognized on the inaugural Forbes Magazine 30 Under 30 list, Vanity Fair Next Establishment list, and Business Insider Silicon Valley 100 list.

Combining a business background with engineering research and a focus on emerging technologies, Ernestine has authored numerous publications on topics ranging from autonomous vehicles to renewable energy. A champion of connected cars and smart cities, she programmed a full-vehicle driving simulator at Stanford University’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab. She later published award-winning research on human operator and autonomous vehicle interactions in top-ranked ACM and IEEE conferences. To address pressing environmental challenges, she led research on renewable energy, co-authoring Renewed Energy with energy economist John Weyant. Ernestine has also studied how frontier technologies such as additive manufacturing and 5G will shape the next economy. She is an inventor on numerous technology patents.

Participating as active citizens in our democracy is a core value that Ernestine promotes. She co-authored Civic Work, Civic Lessons with former Stanford Law School Dean Thomas Ehrlich to encourage community engagement with informed moral and civic judgment. The two have published several articles on political engagement and higher education. She has served as a board director and advisor to nonprofits such as the Ad Council, California 100, and the Presidio Institute.

She completed her B.S., M.S., MBA, and Ph.D. at Stanford University. Graduating with Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa honors, she received the Kennedy Prize for the top undergraduate thesis in engineering and the Terman Award as one of the top thirty graduating seniors in engineering. She teaches courses on emerging technology and venture capital as a lecturer at Stanford.

She is a Kauffman Fellow and Eisenhower Fellow.