Our Leadership Team

E. David Ellington is an attorney, institutional investor, and entrepreneur operating at the intersection of law, capital, and technology. He is the Founder & Chairman of Emory Capital, a digital-first private and institutional investment and advisory platform focused on traditional venture capital and digital asset opportunities, including Bitcoin and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.

Mr. Ellington previously served as a Trustee and Commissioner on the Board of the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System (SFERS), overseeing a US$20B public pension portfolio. During his tenure, he held senior leadership roles including Board President, Chair of the Investments Committee (Alternatives), Chair of the Governance Committee, and member of the Finance Committee. SFERS was a limited partner in more than 120 private equity, venture capital, and distressed debt funds while he served.

He is also the Founder of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society (SVBS), a cross-sector convening platform bringing together investors, technologists, legal experts, regulators, and policymakers to support responsible adoption and improved market structure in blockchain-based systems.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Ellington began as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, later relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area where he founded NetNoir, a community-driven internet portal that anticipated the emergence of modern social networks.

Mr. Ellington has extensive international experience across Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok, London, Dubai, Paris, and India, with longstanding engagement across cross-border business, governance, and technology ecosystems.

He earned a B.A. in History from Adelphi University, an M.A. in Comparative Politics from Howard University, and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, with a concentration in international, corporate, and tax law. He also completed Cornell University's FALCON Japanese language program.

Jim Merry is an investor, engineer, and operating executive with more than 30 years of experience spanning high-technology software, venture-backed startups, and digital asset investing. He serves as Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Emory Capital, supporting disciplined exposure strategies aligned with institutional expectations.

Mr. Merry began investing in Bitcoin after reading the Bitcoin white paper in 2011 and later expanded into Ethereum and a broader set of early-stage blockchain protocols and companies. By 2017, he began making angel investments in early-stage blockchain ventures, including the first investment in Silicon Valley Blockchain Society (SVBS) in late 2017. He currently manages a portfolio of 30+ blockchain-related investments through affiliated entities and has held multiple limited partner positions in Pantera funds.

His digital asset activity has included operating validator nodes and selectively engaging with yield-generating decentralized protocols, alongside a long-standing focus on risk awareness, infrastructure durability, and market structure evolution.

Mr. Merry has held senior leadership roles in sales, business development, and marketing at companies including Nvidia, Adobe, and Autodesk. He has also worked at multiple venture-funded startups, several of which achieved successful exits. His career has focused on commercializing complex technical software products, including enterprise visualization systems, collaboration tooling for global manufacturers, and advanced 3D design and rendering technologies.

At Adobe, he served as a U.S. delegate and subject matter expert on ISO PDF technical committees and related standards bodies, including LOTAR and U.S. Department of Defense working groups supporting model-based engineering frameworks. He also served as President of the 3D PDF Consortium's board of directors and co-authored 3D with HOOPS (Addison-Wesley, 1996).

Mr. Merry holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from Cornell University.

[Roommates: Jim and David were roommates from 1995-1997 in the San Francisco Bay Area]

Shota Ishii is an executive, technologist, and investor with more than 25 years of experience at the intersection of machine learning, quantitative analytics, and finance. He advises Emory Capital on AI-driven investment frameworks, institutional adoption of advanced analytics, and governance-aligned approaches to data infrastructure and risk management.

Previously, Mr. Ishii served as Managing Director at State Street's innovation lab in San Francisco, where he led development of next-generation portfolio analytics, risk management tools, and investment products designed for institutional clients. He has held senior roles spanning business and research across Shinsei Bank, DCI (now part of Blackstone Credit), and KMV (now part of Moody's Analytics), working across banking, asset management, and corporate finance environments.

Mr. Ishii has extensive experience partnering with global banks, insurers, and asset managers on applied AI initiatives, data governance, high-performance computing, and operational decision systems. He has also advised Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) on asset allocation and the use of alternative data.

As an entrepreneur, he has founded and scaled multiple ventures, most recently ProssimoTech, an AI platform focused on automating working-capital optimization through ERP data extraction and analytics. He has investment, M&A, and exit experience across technology companies in Japan, the U.S., the U.K., France, Singapore, and beyond.

A frequent speaker across industry and academia, Mr. Ishii has lectured at institutions including Stanford, UC Berkeley, Tokyo University of Science, National University of Singapore, NYU, and the World Economic Forum.

Mr. Ishii holds a B.S. in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University and an MBA from INSEAD, and is fluent in Japanese, English, and French.

[Paris: Shota and David met while both were living in Paris, France in 2008]