Nancy Pfund

Nancy E. Pfund is Founder and Managing Partner of the venture capital firm DBL Partners. As a pioneer and leading player in the field of impact investing, DBL has helped to reveal the power of venture capital to promote social change and environmental improvement. In this context, Pfund writes and speaks frequently on the field of impact investing, sustainable agriculture and nature-based solutions to climate change.

Pfund sponsors or sits on the board of directors of several companies including: Farmer’s Business Network, Bellwether Coffee, Spatial, Wynd, DroneSeed and, prior to their public offerings, Tesla Motors, SolarCity and Pandora. She also served on the board of SolarCity, from 2008 until its acquisition by Tesla, on both the audit and compensation committees and chairing its corporate governance committee.

Prior to founding DBL, Pfund was a Managing Director at JPMorgan, having started her investment career at Hambrecht & Quist. Previously, she worked at Intel Corporation, the State of California, Stanford University, and the Sierra Club.

Pfund was recognized by the San Francisco Business Times as one of the Bay Area’s 100 Most Influential Business Leaders in 2023 and by the Financial Women of San Francisco as the Financial Woman of the Year in 2022. In 2023, Pfund was named to Forbes' 50 Over 50 list and to their 2020 Impact 50 List of the most notable impact investors. She was also a recipient of The Commonwealth Club 2018 Distinguished Citizen Award and the Earth Day Network 2018 Climate Visionary Award. She was featured #17 in Fortune magazine's Inaugural World’s Top 25 Eco-Innovators in 2014 and appeared on Fast Company’s 2016 List of Most Creative People in Business.

Pfund serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Geographic Society. She is a member and former Chapter Chair of the Silicon Valley Women Corporate Directors Foundation. She is a member and former chair of the Advisory Council of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University; an advisor to the UC Davis Center for Energy Efficiency; and co-chair of the Yale School of Management Program on Entrepreneurship.

She has been a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Yale School of Management and is a past member of the C3E Ambassador to the U.S. Clean Energy Education and Empowerment Program, led by the U.S. Department of Energy. Pfund was also a founding officer and director of ABC2, a foundation aimed at accelerating a cure for brain cancer. She was also a founding member of the California Clean Energy Fund and served as an Advisory Board member of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Cyclotron Road, its Clean Energy Incubator.

Pfund received both her BA and MA in anthropology from Stanford University, and her MBA from the Yale School of Management.