Eric Paley, Chair

Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development Eric Paley joined the Healey-Driscoll Administration in September 2025. For more than 25 years prior to entering state government, Paley worked to shape the innovation economy as both a successful entrepreneur and a leading venture capitalist. As co-founder and Managing Partner of Founder Collective, Paley helped build one of the world’s highest-performing seed-stage venture capital funds. His investment portfolio includes groundbreaking technology companies across diverse sectors such as transportation, media, healthcare, consumer, advanced manufacturing and enterprise software, including Uber (NYSE), The Trade Desk (NSDQ), Omada Health, Whoop, Formlabs and Airtable. He served on the Board of Directors of The Trade Desk from its founding until 2023, including as a public director after the company’s IPO in 2016. At Founder Collective, Paley also launched Collective Future, an annual Boston conference bringing together Massachusetts’ most influential innovators across technology, government, media, cultural and non-profit sectors to collaboratively shape the future of the innovation economy.

Before Founder Collective, Paley founded and served as CEO of Brontes Technologies, a hard-tech startup that commercialized novel 3D imaging technology to enable advanced manufacturing in dentistry and that spun out of MIT. Paley continued to lead the company after its acquisition by 3M in 2006.

Paley holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two children. He previously served on the Board of Directors of the YMCA of Greater Boston and has been engaged in philanthropic efforts primarily to alleviate food insecurity in Massachusetts.