21st July 2012

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so after some small notoriety in 2007 teaching a class on Facebook at Stanford (strangely, a school where I wasn’t good enough to get accepted as a student, somehow let me become a visiting lecturer), I decided I’d try to become a venture capitalist. my timing was of course impeccable, and as i was attempting to raise a small fund in summer 2008 the next huge financial crisis hit, and the bottom fell out of the market. again I was fortunate, and my plan B was to humbly say yes to a job offer by Sean Parker to help do some marketing and investing at Founders Fund. I was likely the only person hired in the entire venture industry in Q4 of 2008 (thanks Sean, I owe you one). I threw myself into the job, and after a year and a half had made some decent picks investing in Twilio, SendGrid, Wildfire, and TaskRabbit among others. along the way, I also got the opportunity to run the Facebook fbFund for a short time, and made some friends at Accel and Redpoint and BlueRun. these folks, along with Founders Fund, Mitch Kapor, Michael Birch, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Marc Andreessen, and several other generous souls helped me to finally and barely raise a small fund in 2010 that I brazenly named 500 Startups.
— Dave McClure

Tagged: lifecareerchoicesuccessbusinessexperience

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Source: 500hats.com

  1. edvard posted this