Board Governance

LizAnn is a trusted advisor to companies, organizations and individuals facing complex business and legal challenges. She is a highly accomplished professional with a remarkable career that spans the legal, academic, and public sectors. Her career has been shaped by working collaboratively to identify opportunities, implement value-enhancing strategies and solve problems. LizAnn brings an unusual range of business, strategy and regulatory expertise in both large organizations and startups. She regularly advises entrepreneurs, evaluates and invests in businesses, and serves on public, private and governmental boards.

LizAnn is an Acting Professor of the Practice at Cornell Law School, and has taught at Cornell in Ithaca and Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island since 2018. At the end of 2018, LizAnn retired from Cravath, where she had been a Corporate Partner since 2005, and had a wonderful 20 plus-year career. Her practice focused on domestic and international public and private corporate finance transactions, corporate governance and reporting matters, M&A, and liability management transactions. She has worked across many industries, including technology, financial services, industrials and consumer products.

From January 2022 to September 2022, LizAnn served as the Deputy Director, Disclosure Operations, Division of Corporation Finance at the SEC. In that seat, she led a team of over 350 people overseeing the disclosure review program for ‘33 and ‘34 Act disclosure, including in emerging areas such as fintech and digital assets, and division-wide performance evaluation, risk oversight and strategy.

LizAnn’s experiences have deepened her passion to work with entrepreneurs as a valuable sounding board to them on strategy, regulatory matters and talent. She was on the board of a SPAC and serves on the board of CEA company capitalizing on emerging market trends. Since 2018, through teaching at Cornell Tech, she has spent time with entrepreneurs early in their startup journey. This complements her role as a Senior Partner, Strategy & Regulatory, at Braven, an early-stage investment firm, and as an independent advisor to startups in the fintech, digital health and consumer products.

David J. Kappos is Co-Chair of Cravath’s Intellectual Property Practice. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost leaders in the field of intellectual property, including intellectual property management and strategy; the development of global intellectual property norms, laws, and practices; and commercialization and enforcement of innovation-based assets.

Mr. Kappos supports the firm’s clients with a wide range of their most complex intellectual property issues, including those pertaining to blockchain, cryptoassets, and fintech, as well as data security and privacy. From August 2009 to January 2013, Mr. Kappos served as Undersecretary of Commerce and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that role, he advised the President, the Secretary of Commerce, and the administration on intellectual property policy matters. As Director of the USPTO, he led the agency in dramatically re-engineering its entire management and operational systems as well as its engagement with the global innovation community. Mr. Kappos was instrumental in achieving the greatest legislative reform of the U.S. patent system in generations through passage and implementation of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, signed into law by President Obama in September 2011.

Prior to leading the USPTO, Mr. Kappos held several executive posts in the legal department of IBM, including litigation counsel; Asia Pacific IP counsel; and, from 2003 to 2009, Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property Lawyer responsible for all patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret matters worldwide.

Bill Priestap is a founder of Trenchcoat Advisors, a boutique risk management firm. He is a recognized thought leader in national security, with a particular expertise in business security risks. Mr. Priestap spent 21 years at the FBI. While serving as head of the Counterintelligence Division, his responsibilities included the development and implementation of the organization’s global strategy to counter foreign nations’ intelligence efforts against the United States. Earlier in his career, Mr. Priestap handled transnational organized crime and later counterterrorism investigations. Over the years, he has interacted with hundreds of businesses and gained deep insight into the risks they face. Mr. Priestap is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he was previously a Centennial Fellow.

Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is a Fellow of the Initiative on the Digital Economy, of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, of MIT Connection Science, and of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger retired from IBM in May of 2007 after a 37-year career with the company, where his primary focus was on innovation and technical strategy. He led a number of IBM’s companywide initiatives including the internet, supercomputing, and Linux. Dr. Wladawsky-Berger has been Adviser on Digital Strategy and Innovation at Citigroup, at HBO, and at MasterCard; Adjunct Professor at the Imperial College Business School; and guest columnist at the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal. Since 2005, he has been writing a weekly blog, irvingwb.com.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger is a member of the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Linux Foundation Research Advisory Board. He was co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee as well as a founding member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A native of Cuba, he was named the 2001 Hispanic Engineer of the Year. Dr. Wladawsky-Berger received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.