Investors

True Ventures

True is a venture firm for early stage entrepreneurs that offers founders of high growth companies an investment partner with experience, creativity and strength.

True's team has directly founded over half a dozen startups and has over seventy years of combined venture capital experience.

Youniversity Ventures

Youniversity helps talented teams with innovative products take the next step.

The principals of the fund have invested in, and worked closely with, some of the greatest B2C web companies from their founding, including PayPal, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Trulia, with several others on the way.

ICBT Capital Partners

ICBT is a private, value-focused hedge fund based in San Francisco that invests in the public markets and high growth private equity opportunities.

Maurice Werdegar

Maurice joined Western Technology Investment in 2001. His diverse background includes his most recent position as Venture Partner at iMinds Ventures, an early stage venture firm, and his prior position as Chief Investment Officer at MetaMarkets, an online mutual fund company. Maurice also founded and served as CEO of Left at Albuquerque, a chain of restaurants.

Prior to business school, Maurice worked in corporate finance at Robertson Stephens. He holds a B.A. and an MBA from Stanford University.

Aydin Senkut

Aydin Senkut is the Founder and President of Felicis Ventures. He's been an angel investor in promising start-ups since the end of 2005 and his portfolio encompasses over 40 companies including Brightroll, Disqus, Imageshack, Justin.tv, Meraki, Mint (acquired by Intuit), Mochi Media, Posterous, Powerset (acquired by Microsoft), Plusmo (acquired by AT&T), Practice Fusion, RichRelevance, Sendori (acquired by IAC), Tapulous, and Yume Networks.

Prior to starting Felicis Ventures, Aydin was a Senior Manager at Google, responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Asia Pacific (including Japan). Aydin joined Google in 1999 as a Product Manager to launch Google's first 10 international sites, its first online search licensing products and its first Safe Search. He then became the first International Sales Manager at Google, responsible for worldwide licensing deals. He closed key deals for Google with strategic portals around the world including Lycos (Hotbot) in the US, Web.de in Germany, UOL in Brazil, NTT, NEC, Fujitsu, and Rakuten in Japan, Sina, Netease and Tencent in China, Korea Telecom, Empas and Dacom in Korea, iPrimus/AOL in Australia, and Yam and Hi-net in Taiwan.

In the process, he built Google's Asian syndication business from less than $1M in 2002 to more than $100M in 2005. Before joining Google, Aydin was the Product Manager for Data Visualization and Data Mining software MineSet, and led the business development efforts for the financial services industry at SGI.

Aydin received a B.S. in Business Administration with Honors from Boston University. He also earned an MBA in Marketing from the Wharton School and an M.A. in International Studies from the School of Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He speaks five languages: English, German, French, Portuguese and Turkish.

He is a benefactor to the University of Pennsylvania and UCSF. Aydin has been a Mentor to students in the Entrepreneurship class at Stanford University and is on the boards of Imageshack and the Wharton Entrepreneurial Program.

Aydin has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Financial Times Germany, Cnet, TechCrunch, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Keith Rabois

Keith leads business development and strategy for Slide, the world's leading community-driven entertainment company. Prior to joining Slide, Keith ran business development and advertising sales for LinkedIn, and, earlier in his career, he served as Executive Vice President of Business Development and Policy for PayPal. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Yelp and Xoom, and was an early investor in YouTube and LinkedIn.

Keith graduated from Stanford University and earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He also practiced law at Sullivan & Cromwell. Keith is the only person who owns equity in every VC-financed consumer Internet company founded by former PayPal employees. He is also a Sequoia Technology Partner at Sequoia Capital. You can see his full list of affiliations at krabois.com.

Aaron Patzer

Aaron is both the visionary and technical mind behind Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), now the leading free, online money management in the US. He designed Mint.com to meet the needs of people who value the immediacy of the web, simplicity and their free time. Prior to founding Mint, Aaron was an architect and technical lead for the San Jose division of Nascentric. Before Nascentric, Aaron worked for IBM and founded two web development and online marketing companies: PWeb and International. Aaron holds an MSEE from Princeton University and a B.S. in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering from Duke University. He has 10 patents filed or pending.

Aaron's innovation leadership has been recognized by national and international organizations. CNNMoney identified him as one of six Money Heroes in the US in 2008, and Inc. magazine included him in a list of the Top 30 US Entrepreneurs under 30. He was also named one of just 34 worldwide Tech Pioneers by the World Economic Forum of Davos, Switzerland in 2008.

Len Lodish

Dr. Leonard Lodish is a chaired Marketing Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the former Chairman of Wharton's Marketing Department and is now the Vice Dean of Wharton West and the leader of Wharton's Global Consulting Practicum that works with venture backed technology companies in Israel, Chile, Peru, Spain, China, and India. A prolific author, Professor Lodish is internationally known for creating numerous marketing decision support systems as well as for his research on marketing experimentation, entrepreneurial marketing, expert systems in marketing, and promotion and advertising decision support. He consults extensively with corporations around the world and has assisted Procter & Gamble, Conagra and Merck with decisions on marketing strategy, advertising and promotion decision support, among other issues. He is a director of numerous public companies including Information Resources, Inc., Franklin Electronic Publishers, Inc., and J&J Snack Foods, Inc.

Jawed Karim

Jawed co-founded YouTube to enable individuals worldwide to broadcast themselves. YouTube is now the third most popular website in the world and one of the fastest-growing websites in the history of the Internet. Prior to YouTube, Jawed was one of the earliest engineers at PayPal, now the world's largest online payment service, where he implemented its first real-time anti-fraud systems.

Jawed has a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University. Jawed is also a Sequoia Technology Partner at Sequoia Capital.

Kevin Hartz

Kevin co-founded Eventbrite, a popular event registration service, with the goal of simplifying event management and ticketing. Prior to Eventbrite, Kevin was co-founder and CEO of Xoom Corporation, an international money transfer company providing service in over 30 countries, whose investors included Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital and Stanford University. Kevin also co-founded ConnectGroup, a startup providing high-speed Internet access to the hotel industry, which was acquired by Lodgenet in 1998.

Kevin holds a B.A. and B.S. from Stanford University and an M.A. from Oxford University. He has been an early-stage investor and advisor to startups such as PayPal, Geni.com, Friendster, Flixster.com, and Trulia.

Kevin is also a Sequoia Technology Partner at Sequoia Capital. You can see his full list of affiliations at kevinhartz.com.

Russ Fradin

Russ co-founded Adify with Larry Braitman and Rick Thompson. Most recently, Russ was the SVP of Business Development for Wine.com, the Internet's largest seller of wine where he was responsible for creating new revenue channels for the business. Before joining Wine.com, Russ was the EVP of Corporate Development for comScore Networks. Russ began at comScore in 2000 before comScore signed its first customer and was responsible for starting many of the company's businesses as well as structuring strategic alliances.

Russ began his career at Flycast Communications and had a number of roles during his four-year tenure, finally serving as Flycast/Engage's VP of Business Development. Russ holds a B.S. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Chris Dixon

Chris is co-founder of Hunch, a site that helps users make decisions and gets smarter the more its used. He is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies including Skype, TrialPay, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of others that are still in stealth mode. He is also a member of Founder Collective and was previously the co-founder and CEO of SiteAdvisor through its acquisition by McAfee. SiteAdvisor has been downloaded over 135 million times, and was named Time Magazine's "50 Coolest Websites", Popular Science's "Best of What's New", and PC World's "100 Best Products of 2007" (#15).

Prior to SiteAdvisor, Chris worked at Bessemer Venture Partners making early-stage investments, including the lead investment in the Series A of Skype. He has also designed and programmed multimedia web applications, including the original version of Oddcast's talking avatar software, and the karaoke software that became kSolo, later acquired by MySpace/Fox.

Chris has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.A and M.A. from Columbia University, where he majored in Philosophy.

Ron Conway

Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail.

Ron was previously with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions from 1973-1979, and Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President and CEO from 1979-1990. He eventually took Altos public in 1982 and served as CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS) from 1991-1995. PTS went on to be acquired by SmartForce/SkillSoft. Ron has served/serves on Boards/Advisory Boards including: Twitter, Digg, Bright Mail, Ask Jeeves, Rupture (acquired by EA), Associated Content, Facebook, RockYou, ScanScout, Zappos, Trulia, StumbleUpon, Plaxo (acquired by Comcast), Photobucket (acquired by Fox), and Anchor Intelligence (co-founder).

Ron was named #6 in the Forbes Magazine Midas List of top "deal-makers" in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors. He is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation and SF Homeless Connect and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation.

Ron is also featured in Gary Rivlin's book The Godfather of Silicon Valley: Ron Conway and the Fall of the Dot-coms, and is described as "the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone else in Silicon Valley."

Jeff Clavier

Jean-Francois "Jeff" Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. Since 2004, Jeff has invested in more than 50 consumer Internet companies in areas like social media, communities, search, gaming, or consumer infrastructure, almost exclusively in Silicon Valley. With over 20 years of operational, entrepreneurial and venture capital experience, Jeff is able to add relevant perspective and value to his companies as they grow from inception to maturity, and hopefully, success.

In 2007, Jeff was recognized as one of the 13 "Web 2.0 King Makers" by (late) Business 2.0, and in 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of "The 25 Most Influential People on the Web". He is often noted for his investments in categories such as "passion-centric communities" or online gaming, or for having sold five of his Web 2.0 startups to the likes of Yahoo, AOL or Hearst Interactive.

In September 2007, Jeff announced the formation of SoftTech VC II, L.P. – a $15M seed fund backed by a mix of institutional and private investors that will invest in 50+ consumer Internet companies over 3 years. During its first 24 months of activity, the fund has closed 40+ investments, most of them still operating in stealth/pre-launch mode.

Believing that you have to practice what you invest in, and vice-versa, Jeff started Software Only in 2004, one of the early venture capital blogs, where he primarily covered social media, search, online communities, and investing. After a few years of active posting, Jeff switched to micro-blogging, and a less time consuming production, mostly through @jeff on Twitter.

Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff spent more than 16 years in the enterprise software world as an entrepreneur, senior executive and venture capitalist. Throughout his career, he was exposed to global markets leading development teams in Europe and on Wall Street, designing products sold internationally and investing in software infrastructure startups across the U.S. and Europe. In 2000, he became President of RVC Capital, the firm managing the Reuters Greenhouse Fund with $600M invested in 82 companies, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com, and Infoseek.

Jeff was born, raised and educated in France, earning an M.S. in Computer Science and a research degree in Distributed Computing. He has been happily living in Silicon Valley since 2000 with his wife Bernadette and their two children. When he is not busy working, Jeff likes to spend time with his family and friends, cook, collect wine and wander around Northrend on his hunter. He also skies, hikes, dives and plays golf so poorly it is not even funny.

Harris Barton

Harris was Managing Partner of HRJ Capital, a manager of private equity and hedge funds of funds, which he co-founded in 1999 after concluding a 10-year professional football career with the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League. He has also served on the Board of Directors of JMP Group, Inc. since May 2008.

Harris received a B.A. in Finance from University of North Carolina.