When something doesn’t exist, Jeremiah tends to build it. As a kid, he wanted to play lacrosse, but his school had no boys’ team. So he played on the girls’ team and rallied enough boys to follow that a team eventually formed (sadly, the year after he graduated, but still). That same instinct, see what’s missing and build it, has defined a career spent building systems that scale, from warehouse robots to cloud platforms used by millions.
At Underscore, Jeremiah advises the investing team in selecting portfolio companies and serves as a trusted sounding board to founders working through the hardest technical and organizational decisions. Because he is also a Distinguished Engineer at Shopify, that sounding board comes with something rare in venture: a genuinely current, on-the-ground operator’s view of what it actually takes to build, scale, and ship at the frontier. Founders don’t get advice from someone who once shipped code. They get it from someone who ships at scale every day.
Jeremiah began as an Underscore Core Partner in 2021, and has taken time to offer advice to a number of portfolio companies before joining the team officially.
Before Shopify, Jeremiah served as Chief Technology Officer at Twilio, where he led the company’s technology strategy and brought architecture, platform, and data design under a single roof. Earlier, he was an SVP and Distinguished Architect at Salesforce, a Principal Engineer at Amazon Robotics (where he helped pioneer the idea of robotics in the cloud, after Amazon acquired Kiva Systems and its now-iconic little orange warehouse robots), and co-founded an electronic health records company around the turn of the millennium, a venture he’ll tell you was a little ahead of its time. He holds patents across robotics, machine learning, distributed systems, and consumer engagement.
Outside of work, Jeremiah lives through his wife and two kids in the best possible way, and tries to take on something new every year. Pilot’s license, motorcycle, violin, furniture-building, skydiving, the list keeps growing. He’s an avid hiker and runner, and a former member of the Pittsburgh Boys Choir and Pittsburgh Opera Company, with whom he once toured Russia.
Jeremiah received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University.