Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall E301
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

eberhart@stanford.edu
(650) 725-0121 (voice)
(650) 723-6530 (fax)

Research Interests
Comparative corporate governance in Asia and the US, theories of institutions, Japanese entrepreneurship and venture finance, Japanese corporate governance.

Robert Eberhart is a Research Fellow at Stanford's Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. His research focuses on comparative corporate governance with special emphasis on Japan and the role of Japanese institutions in fostering entrepreneurship. From 1999 - 2007, he served as CEO of WineInStyle, a venture capital-funded start-up company in Japan that developed a solution that radically shortened the supply chain for wine distribution in that country. Robert Eberhart is currently a managing partner at a San Francisco based private equity firm where he is responsible for initiating, closing, and managing a portfolio of investments in Japan and U.S. ventures. Robert was previously President of the Japan subsidiary of Plantronics Inc., and he held engineering management positions at Applied Materials Corp. and Performance Semiconductor Corp. where he led the team that manufactured the world's first R4000 RISC chip.

Mr. Eberhart received a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Michigan after undergraduate studies in Finance at Michigan State University. He is a member of the American Economic Association, was a presenter at SPRIE's "Beyond Borders: Global Entrepreneurship" event and presented several seminars in Stanford's US-Asia Technology Management Center.

Mr. Eberhart received awards from the Entrepreneur Association of Tokyo, The National Aerospace Manufacturers Accreditation Program, the Society of Automotive Engineers and was recognized for work on The University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab were he designed and built interferometer components for an exo-planet detection system. He is a private pilot and resides in Palo Alto.