Hooman Shahlavi joined Sofinnova in 2007 as Director of Legal Affairs. For the previous ten years, he was an attorney at two major international law firms — and kept very busy! Most recently, he was a member of O’Melveny & Myers’ Corporate Transactional Group. Prior to that, he practiced in Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison’s Business and Technology Practice Group. At these firms, he worked on over 500 venture capital, M&A and public offering transactions, represented over 70 companies (both private and public) as general outside counsel, and over 50 venture capital funds and investment banks in investment transactions, including a number of transactions in which he represented Sofinnova as its outside counsel.

As Sofinnova’s Director of Legal Affairs, Hooman manages all legal aspects of our investment, follow-on, exit and wind-down transactions, including the structuring, negotiation and execution of the transactions. He also manages and liaises with Sofinnova’s outside counsel and portfolio company counsel on a wide variety of matters and monitors and addresses risk and director liability, labor, litigation and other general legal matters that arise through our ordinary course of business.

Hooman earned his Juris Doctor from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He received his B.S. from San Jose State University, magna cum laude, with a degree in Business Administration (Marketing).

Hooman can be reached at (415) 287-1883 or hooman@sofinnova.com.


Carol Wentworth is the director of marketing at Sofinnova Ventures. Carol has more than 15 years experience driving marketing and communications strategy and implementation in a variety of executive roles. Most recently, Carol launched and ran the start-up practice at global PR firm Bite Communications where she was responsible for assisting the marketing efforts of VC firm Morgenthaler Ventures, as well as dynamic new companies such as imeem and Wikia.

Carol's focus is in devising communication strategies and initiatives designed to achieve a company's overall business objective. In addition to counseling start-ups, she also has provided hands-on consultation services to public companies such as HP, Oracle, Cisco, and Ingres. Earlier in her career, Carol was the director of corporate communications at Object Design when the company was named #1 on the Inc. 500, a list of the nation's fastest-growing private companies.

Carol is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her B.A. in English.

Carol can be reached at (415) 228-3395 or carol@sofinnova.com.

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