Judge, Silicon Valley (UNC) Regional Finals
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Carol Sands is the Founder and the Managing Member of The Angels’ Forum and The Halo Funds. She has 30 years of experience with investing, entrepreneurial, and large corporate institutions. Carol’s career started in the Midwest where she was a bank officer with First Bank Systems and held marketing and sales positions with Motorola and Xerox Computer Services. After moving to San Francisco, she was hired into executive positions at Arthur Young (Ernst & Young) and Coopers & Lybrand (PricewaterhouseCoopers).
In 1997, she formed The Angels’ Forum, an innovative angel group. The Angels’ Forum organizes individual investors with previous entrepreneurial experience to invest using a venture capital model for due diligence, mentoring, and board management.
In 2000, Carol co-founded The Halo Fund, a $25 million venture fund invested in early stage, Silicon Valley based start ups, with Ed Esber, Phil Schlein, Craig Sirnio and Ed Berkowitz. The same core partners later launched Halo II and Halo III.
A globally recognized expert, Carol consults with government officials and corporations about early-stage investing and innovation. She teaches “Angel Investing for the Serious Investor” at Stanford University’s Continuing Education Program and has guest lectured at other universities around the world.
An active investor, she belongs to or consults with many organizations that support the entrepreneurial spirit including The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) as a Charter Member, SV Forum, M31, CINA, The Band of Angels, Golden Seeds, Berkeley and The Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs. Involved in women’s leadership, she is on the Advisory Board for Global Women’s Leadership Network and is a member of The International Women’s Forum.
Passionate about the impact that small amounts of money can make when combined with innovative thinking, she is also a Director of the Sands Family Foundation which funds early stage and pre NIH (National Institute of Health) research relating to prostate and ovarian cancers. Carol received her B.A. in Business Administration from The University of Iowa.