Meet the Team
On Deck Executive Team

David Booth

David Booth

David Booth
David is the CEO of On Deck, where he’s focused on building the world’s most powerful ecosystems for founders to start and scale companies.
Before On Deck, he ran syndicate operations and growth at Angel List, where he evolved how startups were funded within the venture ecosystem. At CoinList, David shaped decentralized capital formation, and at Carta, he helped design how companies were organized and managed. Throughout his career, David has focused on innovating the founder journey: improving their odds at every roadblock and ensuring that more startups not only get off the ground but succeed in their missions.
David is born and bred in New Zealand, where he studied law and finance before launching 3 startups himself. He is a proud dad of 4-year old Charlie.

Trish Kennelly

Trish Kennelly

Trish Kennelly
Trish has been at On Deck since the beginning – leading Customer Experience, Community, and Strategy before becoming COO. She has been scaling early-stage companies and building communities globally for over a decade.
Before On Deck, Trish supported growth-stage entrepreneurs at Unreasonable. Prior to that, she was the first employee at Remote Year, where she helped build a community of thousands of traveling remote professionals in 30+ cities globally and a fully distributed team of 200+ employees.
Trish loves connecting people and possibilities. She has traveled to over 60 countries and has been living without a permanent homebase for 8 years. These days, when she's not building, you can catch her hiking with her pup Goose or (trying to) surf in the Azores, Portugal.

Erika Batista

Erika Batista

Erika Batista
Erika leads On Deck’s investment efforts and supports the global portfolio. In a previous role at On Deck, Erika led International Expansion and helped the company expand to five new markets. She was introduced to On Deck when exploring her next role and joined the fourth cohort of ODF in 2020. Luckily for us, she decided that instead of founding her own company, she wanted to scale her impact by enabling other founders to build theirs.
Before On Deck, Erika was a founding team member and director at the European accelerator, The Family, where she joined as the first employee back in 2013, then grew the company with the founders for seven years. At The Family, she played a key role in building the French tech ecosystem, with a primary mission of growing the company’s international network of investors, founders, and advisors (US & Europe).

Julian Weisser

Julian Weisser

Julian Weisser
Julian is a founder and investor focused on helping more startups get started that will change the world for the better. He dropped out of music school to get into tech and has played a number of roles as we’ve grown On Deck; from leading Product to building our admissions and recruiting teams. He describes his investing as, “voting for the future,” and has backed startups working on everything from dog longevity to asteroid mining and decentralized museums.

Erik Torenberg

Erik Torenberg

Erik Torenberg
Erik Torenberg is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of On Deck. Erik started On Deck as an under-the-radar dinner series for people “on deck” looking for their next thing – to start their next company, meet potential co-founders, or find early supporters. On Deck has become a global community since then, but the spirit of incredibly ambitious people ‘at the table together’ still guides us.
Erik is also a co-founder of Village Global, a VC is backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerger, Sara Blakely and more. Erik has been a founding team member of Product Hunt and Rapt.fm.
Erik writes a newsletter and is particularly well known for How to Grow the Startup Economy and his best career advice, Build Personal Moats.

Heath Jamieson

Heath Jamieson

Heath Jamieson
On Deck Programs Leadership

Charles Cushing

Charles Cushing

Charles Cushing
Charles is a 2x exited founder and alumni of ODF1. He’s been the Director of On Deck Founders since August 2021.
Charles started his career in equity sales and trading at Morgan Stanley Hong Kong. He then spent a decade in San Francisco working on a series of startups, usually as founding COO. His expertise is in finance, fintech, marketplaces, operations and logistics.
When not working on On Deck or spending time with family, he also runs a community of logistics experts called StartOps, and supports and angel invests in early-stage startups.

Laura Thompson

Laura Thompson

Laura Thompson
Laura Thompson is currently the founder and director of Execs on Deck, a curated community for top startup leaders looking to accelerate their careers. Laura was previously an early product lead at GoogleX where she worked on science fiction-sounding technologies like self-driving cars, smart contact lenses and delivery drones. She’s also an angel investor and advisor to a number of mission-driven startups in the edtech, fintech, and pet spaces.
A personal finance nerd, Laura has been leading workshops for 10+ years to help women and young professionals build wealth while pursuing careers and lives they love. Laura splits her time between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico and is an enthusiastic but thoroughly mediocre surfer.