I'm a geek, investor, former coder & entrepreneur, occasional blogger and internet marketing nerd. I've lived in Silicon Valley for over 25 years and I'm passionate about startups & entrepreneurship. I've invested in hundreds of companies all over the world.
I'm the founding partner of 500 Startups (http://500.co), a global seed-stage VC fund & accelerator with ~$200M under management. We have invested in more than 1,000 companies across 50+ countries including: Credit Karma, GrabTaxi, Twilio, Udemy, Ipsy, TalkDesk, Intercom, MakerBot (acq'd by SSYS for $400M), Wildfire (acq'd by GOOG for $350M), and Viki (acq'd by Rakuten for $200M).
Previously, I managed early-stage investments for Founders Fund (2008-2010), and led the Facebook fbFund incubator (2009). After leaving PayPal in 2004, I was an investor/advisor in ~15 startups including Bix.com (acq'd by YHOO), Mint.com (acq'd by INTU), Jambool (acq'd by GOOG), TeachStreet (acq'd by AMZN), SlideShare (acq'd by LNKD), and Mashery (acq'd by INTC). Before PayPal, I founded Aslan Computing, acquired by Servinet in 1998.
500 Startups invests in technology companies building consumer and business internet services. Our headquarters are in Silicon Valley, however our team of 100+ people speaks 20+ languages and is all over the world, including the SF Bay Area, New York City, Miami, LA, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, UK, Norway, Germany, Turkey, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. In addition to investment, we help startups with product and marketing, customer development, design and usability, online distribution, business metrics, and fundraising.
more info:
- my bio: http://bit.ly/AboutDaveMcClure
- my blog: http://500hats.com
- our company: http://500.co
- my presentations: http://slideshare.net/dmc500hats
- my investor profile: http://angel.co/davemcclure
Founding Partner @ I am the founding general partner of 500 Startups, an early-stage seed fund & incubator program focused on consumer/SMB internet & related infrastructure services. Selected areas of interest include financial services & e-commerce, search/social/mobile platforms, personal & business productivity, education & language, family & healthcare, web infrastructure, and tribbles. As of Q1 2015, 500 Startups has made investments in over 1000 companies, including Credit Karma, GrabTaxi, Twilio, Udemy, Ipsy, TalkDesk, InterCom, MakerBot (acq'd SSYS $400M, 2013), Wildfire (acq'd GOOG $350M, 2012), and Viki (acq'd Rakuten $200M, 2013). From April 2010 to Present (5 years 9 months) Investor (FF Angel Fund, Facebook fbFund) @ I managed ~$3M portfolio across two early-stage investment programs: 1) FF Angel: a seed-stage fund focused on tech & internet startups, and 2) Facebook fbFund: an accelerator/incubator for Facebook platform apps & startups (note: fbFund was run jointly with Accel Partners, Founders Fund, & Facebook). I made ~40 investments including Twilio, Credit Karma, SendGrid, Lyft/ZimRide, and Wildfire Interactive, among others.
- list of FF Angel investments -- see http://bit.ly/FFangel
- list of Facebook fbFund investments -- see http://fbFund.com From October 2008 to March 2010 (1 year 6 months) Investment Director @ The Facebook fbFund was a joint venture by Facebook, Founders Fund, and Accel Partners that provided early-stage capital to startups using Facebook Platform & Facebook Connect. I ran the 2009 incubator program and led 20+ investments including Wildfire (acq'd by Google in 2012), Lyft (then ZimRide), Life360, & TaskRabbit (then RunMyErrand), among others. From January 2009 to December 2009 (1 year) Advisor, Angel Investor @ I was an investor, advisor, & marketing consultant to financial services startup Mint.com. I helped the marketing team with content syndication & blogging strategy, customer research & market positioning, channel strategies for customer acquisition, and search engine marketing.
I also participated in the Series A financing led by Shasta Ventures in Q2/2007. The company was acquired by Intuit in Nov 2009 for $170M. From November 2006 to October 2008 (2 years) Startup Advisor, Investor @ I was an investor, advisor, & consultant for internet startups focused on consumer and business services such as: financial services & e-commerce, personal & business productivity, search & social networking, web analytics & infrastructure. Notable investments/clients included: Mint.com (INTU), oDesk, Mashery (INTC), TeachStreet (AMZN), KissMetrics, Jambool (GOOG), Twilio, and SlideShare (LNKD). From August 1999 to October 2008 (9 years 3 months) Conference Organizer @ Web 2.0 Expo (2006-2008): as a consultant to O'Reilly, I helped create & co-chair the Web 2.0 Expo tech conference. I defined conference objectives, designed conference tracks & programs, recruited program committees & advisory board members, and reviewed over 500 submissions for conference talks. I organized 60+ talks & panel sessions and recruited over 100 notable industry speakers. I helped promote & market the conference to the technology community, including press & bloggers, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, VCs, and tech execs, resulting in over 10,000 attendees.
Graphing Social Patterns (2007-2008): As a partner with O'Reilly Media, I was the co-founder and conference chairperson for a business & technology conference about facebook, social networking platforms, and social applications. I produced 3 conferences in 2007 and 2008 attended by over 1,000 web developers, media & advertising execs, investors and press. From July 2006 to June 2008 (2 years) San Francisco Bay AreaVisiting Lecturer @ I was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University and co-instructor with Prof. BJ Fogg for CS377W, Creating Engaging Facebook Applications, the nation's first-ever course on building web applications for Facebook Platform. The class emphasized the use of business metrics to improve product development & marketing. Collectively 25 teams in the class created over 50 Facebook apps resulting in over 20M installs and ~1M active users in December 2007. 5 teams in the class created apps which generated more than 1M installs and were among the top 100 Facebook apps as measured by installs and active users. Several apps were acquired by commercial entities, and two teams successfully raised venture financing. From September 2007 to December 2007 (4 months) Director Marketing @ I led the marketing team responsible for launch, PR, website content, search engine marketing, site metrics, community, and customer support. Along with the product team, I helped create the Simply Hired brand, voice, and overall site look and feel. I was responsible for strategic partnerships with LinkedIn and O'Reilly Media, and our SimplyFired satirical website & campaign attracted national news coverage. I created the first-ever conference on vertical search with speakers from over two-dozen search startups along with Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. I was also an investor in the Series B financing in August 2005. From January 2005 to May 2006 (1 year 5 months) Director Marketing @ I started and managed the PayPal Developer Network, a community of ~300,000 web designers and developers who use PayPal to build E-Commerce websites, solutions, and services. I managed a team of technical evangelists to help deliver technical education & marketing, create site content, build PayPal add-on solutions for various web development and productivity tools, community message boards & forums, documentation, and conferences. I also interacted closely with the Product and Marketing teams to help drive product strategy, marketing communication strategy, and provide regular customer feedback on current and requested functionality. From September 2001 to October 2004 (3 years 2 months) Founder/CEO @ I founded and bootstrapped an internet & ecommerce professional services startup to $2M revenue and 20 employees in 3 years. Clients included Intel, Microsoft, Netscape, Stanford, Intuit, and Venture One. The company won Microsoft Partner of the Year, Northern California in 1997, and was later acquired by Servinet/Panurgy in January 1998. I continued to manage the business unit profitably post-acquisition, until leaving in summer 1999. From April 1994 to July 1999 (5 years 4 months) Developer / Proj Mgr @ Designed, developed, deployed client/server information systems and SQL DB systems for corporate clients in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Worked with Microsoft & Intel for two years developing and managing mission-critical capacity planning and scheduling system for Intel worldwide production and manufacturing. Managed technical projects and teams, deployed systems, provided maintenance & support, systems training. Technical skills included application development, SQL database development, database admin & tuning. From February 1988 to April 1994 (6 years 3 months) San Francisco Bay Area
BS Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Foosball, Ultimate Frisbee. @ The Johns Hopkins University From 1982 to 1988 Dave McClure is skilled in: Marketing, Product Development, Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Angel Investing, Early-stage Startups, consumer internet, internet marketing, Creative BS, Hot Air, Humor, 140 character wit, Lean Startup, Product Management, Metrics
Websites:
http://500hats.com,
http://angel.co/davemcclure,
http://500startups.com