Martin Roscheisen
R. Martin Roscheisen is an Austrian-American technology entrepreneur. Early life. Roscheisen was born and raised in Munich, Germany, as an Austrian citizen. Attending Feodor Lynen high school near Munich, he graduated valedictorian in 1987. As a teenager, he spent a year at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley. He subsequently studied computer science and electrical engineering at Technical University of Munich, graduating at the top of his class. In 1992, he moved to California to earn a doctorate in engineering at Stanford University (with fellow students in Terry Winograd's group of the  same year including Sergey Brin and Larry Page.) Business. Roscheisen was among the first generation of entrepreneurs in the late 1990s pursuing opportunities in the commercial Internet; and starting in 2000 he was one of the first entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to focus on green energy technology: - In 1995, Roscheisen co-founded FindLaw, which became the most widely used Internet legal site, for the first time making U.S. case law including all Supreme Court decisions accessible to the public. FindLaw is now a business unit of Thomson Reuters' West Group. - In 1997, Roscheisen, with Stanford professor Yoav Shoham, created TradingDynamics , an enterprise software company which was acquired by Ariba for $740 million in 2000. - In 1998, Roscheisen became founder and CEO of eGroups, an email messaging company, which was financed by Sequoia Capital and ultimately acquired by Yahoo for $450 million. (Google founder Larry Page's brother Carl was also a co-founder of eGroups.) - In 2000, Roscheisen teamed up with Mark Pincus (today CEO of Zynga) to form an incubator called Tank Hill Projects (named after a neighborhood hill in the vicinity of which both reside in San Francisco) to create a series of new companies. Funded  with an initial $10 million, the entity rapidly expanded to a headcount of 50 but shut down by October of the same year to return capital at minimum loss. - In 2002, Roscheisen co-founded and became chairman and CEO of the first solar energy company in Silicon Valley focused on making solar power broadly affordable: Nanosolar. - In 2011, Roscheisen started a grid storage company in the taizhou area with backing by the Chinese government. - In 2015, Roscheisen launched Diamond Foundry, with backing by Leonardo DiCaprio and ten billionaires. - In November 2016, Roscheisen and Diamond Foundry purchased the jewelry brand  VRAI.