Jens Horstmann

Managing Director, Crestlight

Jens Horstmann has 35 years of executive, technology and engineering experience in Silicon Valley and global High Tech industries. He is a founding Partner of MyStepUp, a non profit organization to support and fund women entrepreneurs. He co-founded and served as Managing Director of Salt Flats Capital, the venture arm of Salt Flats, a strategy and innovation firm that assists enterprises in their corporate transformation. Jens is a founding Director and Executive Producer at Crestlight Venture Productions, a global innovation services company and venture funds focused on Machine Learning, IoT and Life-science solutions. He served as VP of Entertainment Technology of NCR Corp. and advises other Fortune 500 companies. Previously, he was CTO, president and CEO of DVDPlay, the creator of Redbox’s original technology. Mr. Horstmann assisted Coinstar in their corporate VC activity, has angel invested in numerous start-ups and serves on several boards. He chaired the German American Business Association and MXGO, an intellectual property licensing firm. Jens founded B2B solution provider Ensemble Solutions in the mid 1990s, after its acquisition, became CEO of Open Grid, an early location based services pioneer and lectured at UC Berkeley. His prior experience includes senior engineering, research and development positions at Sun Microsystems, Siemens, LSI Logic, Deutsche Telekom and predictive analytics firm X1 Corp. He lives in Silicon Valley and the German Southwest and is an avid pilot.