Partner
Allen leads the West Coast presence for Building Ventures from San Francisco. As a partner in the firm, he shares his three decades of product, sales and leadership experience in built environment technology startups with Building Ventures’ portfolio companies, investors, and partners. Allen manages the firm’s involvement at the board level with Hypar and Parspec. He also draws on his vast network of industry connections to oversee the activities of the Building Ventures Innovators Network for the firm.
Prior to joining Building Ventures, Allen was co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Newforma, where he led the team that built the company’s project information management solution that became the industry standard globally for design and consulting engineering firms. While there he also spent three years in London as VP of Global Strategy to establish Newforma as the market leader in the UK and lead the localization efforts that paved the way for market entry to continental Europe.
Prior to Newforma, Allen spent a decade with venture-funded Softdesk, which developed the first commercially-successful suite of CAD applications for Architects, Engineers and Contractors. After evangelizing for Softdesk as a Sales Engineer in North America, he relocated to Singapore to lead the company’s expansion into Asia Pacific. Along the way, Softdesk raised venture capital, completed a successful IPO and was eventually acquired by Autodesk, where Allen was a product manager working on Autodesk’s first generation of building information modeling (BIM) products.
Allen is a San Francisco Bay Area native. He graduated with a BA in economics and math from Occidental College.
