Primary Job Title Co-Founder and Partner Primary Organization 
Pillar VC
Location Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Regions Greater Boston Area, East Coast, New England Gender Male
Investor Type Investor Stage Number of Exits
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Russ Wilcox is the Co-Founder and Partner at Pillar. Prior to VC, he has 20 years of start-up operating experience and has founded three companies.
At Pillar, he is a general partner investing ~$500K to $2 million in seed-stage companies coming out of the Boston-area innovation ecosystem. Pillar typically leads and plays an active role in helping
founders to create new companies and scale them to success.
As Co-Founder and CEO at E Ink Corporation, he commercialized electronic paper invented at the MIT Media Lab. E Ink conducted materials research, filed patents, scaled a factory, and shipped tens of millions of displays for the Amazon Kindle and other devices. To date consumers have purchased more than $10 billion of E Ink-related devices and content.
Following E Ink, Russ co-founded Transatomic Power, advancing a source of clean energy; and Piper Therapeutics, conducting pre-clinical studies for an immuno-oncology drug.
Russ actively supports the Boston entrepreneurial community. Since 2012 he has volunteered as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Harvard Business School Rock Center and counseled hundreds of students on achieving their start-up goals. He sits on the Harvard Physical Sciences Accelerator Review Board and was a Board Director for Harvest Automation, a venture-backed developer of agricultural robots. He has been an angel investor in several start-ups, including Disruptor Beam, PowerInbox, Calimmune, Gen9, DriveFactor, and Camino Financial. Russ began his startup career as a product manager at PureSpeech, a speech recognition company co-founded by Jamie Goldstein.
Russ graduated with honors in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College and worked in Boston and Paris as a management consultant for Oliver Wyman. He was a Baker Scholar at the Harvard Business School. He is an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur of the Year and a Mass High Tech All-Star. He holds thirty-three issued U.S. patents.
Russ enjoys foreign cultures and traveled around the world with his family during 2010-2011. He also supports enrichment education and has coached middle school teams for Destination Imagination, FIRST Lego League, and Model United Nations.
