Thorne Sparkman

Thorne Sparkman is Managing Director of the Slater Technology Fund, an evergreen, not-for-profit seed fund dedicated to new venture development in Rhode Island. He joined Slater in 2000 as Executive Director of the Slater Center for Interactive Technologies — the predecessor to today's fund — and has since focused on the earliest stage of company creation, often partnering with university-based teams working to commercialize their research. Over the course of his career he has described working with or starting more than thirty companies across sectors including financial services, wireless technologies, data storage, and smart-grid/energy systems.

Before Slater, Sparkman was an entrepreneur on the West Coast. From roughly 1996 to 1998 he was founder and CEO of Incubator, Inc., an angel-funded internet business incubator in Berkeley, California, that backed web startups emerging from the university community. Among those was Emptor (later Accept.com), a venture-backed online payments company that was acquired by Amazon.com.

He holds a B.A. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

In February 2022, Sparkman launched a second, complementary vehicle: RightHill Ventures, a Rhode Island–focused fund (seeded by a $300,000 U.S. Economic Development Administration grant) aimed at university research–driven ventures. He co-leads RightHill with Slater Director Bob Chatham and envisions the two funds working in concert — Slater providing initial startup capital, and RightHill helping the most promising university-related companies raise a Series A. RightHill partners with organizations including Brown University's Technology Innovations Office, the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health, the Brown Angel Group, RI Bio, and NEMIC.

• Invests at the earliest stage — Slater is frequently "the first money in" for teams commercializing university research.
• Sector focus on software, energy/clean energy, and life sciences/biotech, favoring "transformative technologies aimed at the world's biggest problems."
• Backs "entrepreneurs who have the vision, courage and tenacity to build companies that aim to achieve transformational impact," and looks for ventures that "solve clear, unmet needs and have the potential to attract the people and resources that great ventures thrive upon."
• Places strong weight on Rhode Island economic impact: "RightHill invests in companies that enhance the economy here in Rhode Island. The typical impact is direct employment."
• For university deals, seeks the combination of "research, and reach" — strong academic science plus alumni/network momentum to drive commercialization.
• Invests both time and money: "Some folks may want to invest time, others may want to invest capital — we're investing both in every deal."
• Emphasizes founder–investor alignment up front: "We just want to be sure we have a shared sense of where we're going and what we're trying to accomplish when the starting gun goes off."