Richard Fishman

Richard Fishman

Richard Fishman -- lawyer, technology executive and venture capitalist -- has recently become a member of Ashoka's senior leadership team. In 1972, fresh out of law school, Richard founded and directed the first Housing and Economic Development Law Program in the southern U.S. His success in developing innovative structures for financing low- and moderate-income housing and counseling minority business entrepreneurs led to his selection as Director of the American Bar Association's National Housing Law Program and Executive Director of the ABA-sponsored Commission on Housing and Urban Growth. In 1977, Richard became partner at the national law firm, Kutak Rock, and built one of the largest housing finance practices in the U.S., representing both state and local housing finance agencies and investment banks. Subsequently, at the international law firm, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, he headed the firm's Structured Finance practice, representing Wall Street investment banks in structuring and issuing corporate and asset-backed securities. He served as Managing Partner of the Washington, DC, offices of both firms. In 1994, Richard became President of Thinking Machines Corporation, which developed and manufactured the world's fasted supercomputers at the time. He reorganized and restructured Thinking Machines, selling its three core components to three major tech companies. As Thinking Machine's employees moved on to create new businesses in the early days of the Web, Richard was sought out as advisor and investor, and through three successive venture capital vehicles, had the good fortune to participate in nine IPOs. Richard has served on the boards of numerous publicly-traded and privately-held companies, and non-profit organizations.