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Erik Moore's Bio

Erik Moore is the founder and Managing Director of Base Ventures. Erik is a passionate angel investor, entrepreneur, creative thinker, and an unabashed optimist.

After a rewarding fifteen-year career in investment banking, Erik secured an early retirement from Merrill Lynch in 2011 and at that point began pursuing his passion for entrepreneurship. He co-founded FlickLaunch.com, a new digital streaming platform on Facebook for feature-length movies. He created Rule LX, a successful special-purpose investment fund, offering a unique, discrete investment opportunity. Base Ventures takes the success of Rule LX and runs with it.

Erik formed Base Ventures from a love for investing in trailblazing tech start-ups. During the past 12-years, Erik has invested in almost two dozen trailblazing start-ups. He's always believed in the powerful magic of human potential. Erik was a seed investor in Zappos.com which was sold to Amazon for $1.2b and Agencourt Biosciences which was sold to Beckman Coulter for $270mm.

Erik is deeply involved in his community. He currently serves as a board member for the East Bay College Fund whose mission is to help resilient youth from Oakland, historically underrepresented in higher education, go to college and expand their life opportunities. He has served on the board of Morrisania West, an organization dedicated to at risk children in the Western Addition, SF. Erik was also a board member for Oakland's OK (Our Kids) program which facilitated a partnership between the police, schools, and the community to help prevent kids from entering the juvenile system. He co-founded an organization, Concentric Circles, that provides informal mentoring and teaches the principals of yoga to youth currently in the juvenile system and those recently released from juvenile hall. Finally, Erik is a former Trustee of Saint Mary's College High School in Berkeley, his alma mater, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude, taught French in the summer, and captained the football team for two years.

Erik earned a B.A. from Dartmouth College, and dual graduate degrees -- an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and an M.A. in International Studies-French from the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He speaks fluent French.

Ryan Merket's Bio

Ryan Merket is a Special Partner at Base Ventures. Ryan is a passionate husband, entrepreneur, angel investor, mentor, and creative thinker.

Ryan has had a lifelong love of tech. He first learned how to program at 11, developed his first site at 13 and started his first internet business at the age of 16.

Prior to Base, Ryan was the CEO and co-founder of AppStores.com, which was acquired by InMobi (one of the largest mobile advertising companies). AppStores.com was a white label app store platform that gives publishers the tools to run their own micro app stores. Ryan founded AppStores.com after leaving Facebook, where he was an early employee and part of the Platform team. While at Facebook he helped major platform partners like Disney, Hulu and Spotify effectively leverage the Facebook Platform. Before Facebook, Ryan co-founded Ping.fm (acquired by Seesmic), a service that allows users to post across multiple social networks at once. He has also worked at CBS Interactive in San Francisco as a Senior Product Designer, where he launched the very first implementation of Facebook Connect and numerous social applications for various properties.

Ryan holds a degree in Visual Design from Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is left-handed, but also loves to code. This gives him a unique perspective that allows him to be a huge asset in product, marketing, engineering, and operations to the companies Base invests in.