Babak joined Madrona as a venture partner in 2023. He brings deep knowledge of creating teams, products, and businesses from the ground up and then scaling them, and he has over two decades of experience at startups, academia, Google, and Amazon.

Journey to Madrona

Before joining Madrona, Babak was a vice president at Amazon for eight and a half years. He founded and led Amazon’s Grand Challenge — the organization responsible for identifying, investing in, and operationalizing substantial new areas for the company. He led Amazon’s expansion into healthcare, including healthcare services, diagnostics, and implementing machine learning for health. He built and led teams focused on wearables, experiential e-commerce, devices and services for childhood development, and machine learning for biotech, among other areas. Before joining Amazon, Babak was a director and distinguished engineer with Google X. At Google, he founded and led the Google Glass team from inception to launch. He co-founded the contact lens team that became a partnership with Novartis. Babak founded and led the robotics surgery program, later spun out as Verb Surgical and recently acquired by Johnson & Johnson.

Lessons learned

People are more important than ideas. A small, determined cohesive motivated group with a clear goal can move mountains.

While he’s not in the office…

Babak continues to fail at playing soccer, at least according to his kids.

Noteworthy

Babak serves on the board of directors of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), is a fellow of SPIE, and has received many recognitions, including the University of Michigan Bicentennial Alumni Award, IEEE CAS Society Industrial Pioneer Award, NSF CAREER Award, Rock Health Inventor of the Year, and MIT Technology Review 35 under 35. His work has been on display at the London Museum of Science and the Computer History Museum and has won Time magazine’s Best Invention of the Year twice. He was recognized by Ad Age as one of the 50 most creative people in the United States.

Babak received a bachelor’s in literature and a master’s in applied and computational mathematics from the University of Washington, a bachelor’s in electronics engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, and two master’s (physics and electrical engineering) and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University.