Shaun Arora graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with Honors and went to work as a cultural anthropologist for consumer packaged goods companies. In 2005, he joined the family electronics manufacturing business, NEO Tech, and worked to scale the business. As a result of his leadership, the business has grown 40X in that time and has over 3400 employees servicing the aerospace, industrial, and medical device industries. As NEO Tech moves into a middle market growth phase Shaun allocates a larger portion of his time towards early stage companies. As an investor, board member and mentor, he’s often playing devil’s advocate and challenging executive teams towards brilliant and uncomfortable thinking. He has worked with a number of hardware startups in particular from prototype to crowdfunding, manufacturing, and subsequent stages of financing. In 2015, Shaun spun off Make in LA from the contract manufacturing business to improve learnings and outcomes for hardware startups. He remains an advisor and a board member at NEO Tech. At Make in LA, Shaun focuses on leveraging NEO Tech’s resources to support the startups, leveraging his portfolio for best practices, providing world class programming, and building strategic partnerships for the benefit of the startups.