VOOB
VistaShares Shield™
Shield™ Enhanced Protection ETFs
Index exposure with built-in downside protection, absorbing the first 8% of monthly losses and half of anything beyond, with no cap on upside and no outcome period to time.
Explore Shield ETFsManaged with domain expertise
Our funds are overseen by an investment committee of operators and scholars who have built and studied these industries firsthand.
Jon McNeill
Co-Founder
Sundeep “Sunny” Madra
Advisor to Investment Committee
Robert Whitelaw
Chief Investment Strategist
Adam Patti
Chief Executive Officer
David Fetherstonhaugh
EVP, Investment Strategist
Jon McNeill
Co-Founder
Jon currently serves as the CEO and Co-Founder of the venture studio, DVx Ventures. With a track record of founding and scaling six companies, Jon has led teams that generated tens of thousands of jobs and delivered multi-billion dollar returns for investors. At DVx, Jon and his team have launched 13 companies that are attacking broad opportunities in large markets.
Previously, Jon served as President at Tesla, where revenue grew from $2B to $20B in just 30 months. Subsequently, Jon joined Lyft as COO, where he played a pivotal role in doubling revenues and helping to take the company public. With a history as a six-time serial entrepreneur creating unicorns, Jon has a wealth of experience in operating and scaling companies during periods of hyper-growth in revenue and operations and has delivered returns of 9x to investors.
Jon currently holds advisory partner positions at Advent International and Goodwater Capital, serves as Vice Chair of the board of directors of Cruise, and is a board member for General Motors, Asurion, CrossFit, Stash, and Lululemon. During his tenure on the board of Lululemon, the company underwent a turnaround, resulting in a quintupling of its stock value.
Jon is a sought-after speaker, and frequently lectures at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management. He graduated from Northwestern University before beginning his career at Bain & Company.
Sundeep “Sunny” Madra
Advisor to Investment Committee
Sundeep “Sunny” Madra is a recognized thought leader in the Artificial Intelligence space known for his deep expertise in AI, machine learning, and large-scale computing systems.
A seasoned entrepreneur, Sunny has an impressive track record of founding and successfully exiting multiple startups. His latest venture, Definitive Intelligence, was acquired by Groq — a cutting-edge computing company known for creating the fastest chip for LLM (Large Language Model) inference, enabling real-time chatbot responses with proprietary Language Processing Units (LPUs) — in early 2024. Following the acquisition, Sunny played a key role in launching GroqCloud and currently serves as the President of Supply Chain, Operations, and Go-to-Market at Groq.
Sunny’s other business ventures include co-founding and serving as CEO of Autonomic, a technology company focused on building infrastructure for smart mobility applications, which was later acquired by Ford. Prior to that, he co-founded and served as CTO of Xtreme Labs, a mobile app development company for leading brands, which was acquired by Pivotal.
In addition to his entrepreneurial ventures, Sunny held leadership roles at Ford, where he served as Vice President of Ford X, overseeing the automaker’s technology-focused initiatives.
Alongside his successful entrepreneurial career, Sunny has been an active angel investor since 2013. His extensive experience in technology, combined with deep expertise in AI, positions him as a key contributing member of the VistaShares investment committee.
Robert Whitelaw
Chief Investment Strategist
Robert F. Whitelaw was most recently the Dean of the Undergraduate College, and continues to serve, as the Edward C. Johnson 3d Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University.
Professor Whitelaw is best known for his comprehensive research on empirical asset pricing, including the resolution of the market-level risk-return puzzle, the role of information processing in explaining excess volatility, and the impact of frictions in generating apparent market inefficiency. His research also addresses the pricing and hedging of fixed income securities, and risk measurement and management.
His papers have been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies, as well as practitioner journals such as the Journal of Derivatives, the Journal of Fixed Income, Risk, and the Financial Analysts Journal. His research has received awards from organizations including Goldman Sachs Asset Management and the Chicago Quantitative Alliance. In addition, he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Program on Asset Pricing, and a past Associate Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Finance.
He has a PhD in Finance from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business and a BS in Mathematics from MIT. Professor Whitelaw teaches portfolio management, investments/capital markets and international finance in the MBA, undergraduate and executive programs and asset pricing at the doctoral level.
Adam Patti
Chief Executive Officer
Adam is a pioneer in the Exchange-Traded Funds industry. Prior to VistaShares, Adam founded IndexIQ with a vision to combine institutional quality alternative investment strategies with the power of ETFs to enhance portfolio construction for all investors. IndexIQ established itself as the leading alternative investment manager in the ETF industry and was acquired by New York Life Insurance Company in 2015.
As Chairman & CEO of IndexIQ, Adam was an architect behind IndexIQ’s award winning product line of alternative investment strategies, and post-acquisition worked to successfully integrate the firm into the New York Life Investments infrastructure, including the roll-out of IndexIQ branded ETFs globally.
Prior to founding IndexIQ, Adam held a series of senior executive roles at TimeWarner, including at Fortune Magazine where he led Fortune Indexes, the creator of the first smart beta index. Fortune Indexes was an early entrant into the ETF industry, having launched the Fortune 500 ETF in partnership with State Street Global Advisors back in 2000.
Adam is frequently featured in the media and has won numerous awards as an expert in ETFs and alternative investments. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management with a triple major in Finance, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, and a B.S. in Finance from University at Albany.
David Fetherstonhaugh
EVP, Investment Strategist
David is a Principal at DVx, overseeing diligence on new ventures and external investments. Before joining DVx, David was at Mithril Capital Management, a global technology investment fund. At Mithril, David worked on the investment team, evaluating esoteric investment opportunities and supporting portfolio companies. David is a graduate at McGill University.
Bill of Materials Approach
Our Bill of Materials approach starts with what actually has to be built. We map the components, equipment, infrastructure, and technologies required for an investment theme to scale, then identify the companies supplying each piece.
Instead of weighting by market cap, we weight by the role each part of the buildout plays. The result is exposure designed to follow where industry CAPEX is going, not simply where market value already sits.
The GPUs, custom accelerators, and CPUs that provide the compute behind training and inference.
Memory in the AI stack spans high-bandwidth DRAM (HBM) that feeds GPUs at speed, NAND flash that stores the massive datasets behind training and inference, and the interconnects that move data between them.
The switches, optical interconnects, and NICs that move data between thousands of GPUs, turning individual servers into a single AI cluster.
The gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) semiconductors and high-density power modules that convert and deliver electricity efficiently to AI chips inside the rack.
The liquid cooling systems, chillers, and thermal management hardware that keep densely packed AI chips running within safe operating temperatures.
All Shield™ Funds
QQQB
VistaShares Shield™
VistaShares Shield™
Nasdaq-100 Enhanced Protection ETF
Harness the power of Pure Exposure™