Robert Eberhart
Professional
Career
Robert Eberhart is a Partner at Actium Ventures LLC, a San Francisco based investment firm where he is responsible for initiating, closing, and managing a portfolio of investments focusing on Japan. Mr. Eberhart is also a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship where he brings 20 years of entrepreneurial experience to the class room. His research focuses on comparative corporate governance with special emphasis on Japan and the role of Japanese institutions in fostering entrepreneurship.
From 1999 - 2007, he served as CEO of WineInStyle, a venture capital-funded start-up company in Japan that developed a solution that radically shortened the supply chain for wine distribution in that country. Mr. Eberhart was previously President of the Japan subsidiary of Plantronics Inc., where before his promotion to Japan, he held positions as the Director of Worldwide Quality and headed the reliability testing functions at Plantronics. There he directed quality operations in California, Mexico and England.
He held engineering management positions at Applied Materials Corp. where he was responsible for establishing efficient manufacturing at Applied’s worldwide supplier base. Prior to joining Applied Materials, Mr. Eberhart was a manufacturing manager at Performance Semiconductor Corp. where he led the team that manufactured the world’s first R4000 RISC chip.
Education and Affiliations
Mr. Eberhart received awards from the Entrepreneur Association of Tokyo, The National Aerospace Manufacturers Accreditation Program, the Society of Automotive Engineers and was recognized for work on The University of California at Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab were he designed and built interferometer components for an exo-planet detection system. He is a private pilot and resides in Palo Alto.
Mr. Eberhart received a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Michigan after undergraduate studies in Finance at Michigan State University. He is a member of the American Economic Association, was a key presenter at Stanford’s “Beyond Borders: Global Entrepreneurship” event and presented several seminars in Stanford’s US-Asia Technology Management Center.