Management Team
Jonathan Abrams – Managing Partner |
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Jonathan Abrams is the founder & CEO of Nuzzel, the super-easy way to see news from your friends. Previously, Jonathan was the founder & CEO of Socializr,
Friendster, and HotLinks, and a software engineer at companies such as Netscape and Nortel. Jonathan is a mentor in Steve Blank's entrepreneurship classes at
Stanford and Berkeley, a top-rated mentor at The Founder Institute, an advisor to AngelList and LeanLaunchLab, and has been extensively involved in the
Silicon Valley entrepreneurial community for over ten years, including as a long-time member of the advisory board of the Silicon Valley Association of
Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE), co-chair of the SDForum Venture Finance SIG, moderator of the SVASE CTO Forum, and a judge for the Stanford Entrepreneur's
Challenge business plan contest, the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition, the Stanford-Berkeley Innovators' Challenge, the Intel Challenge, and Start-Up
Chile.
Michael Levit – Managing Partner |
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Michael is a serial entrepreneur working on his fifth startup, Spigot Inc., which he co-founded in 2008. Prior to Spigot Michael ran the business side of
Vendio, an eCommerce platform, where he grew transactions to $1.5+ billion/year before selling the business to Chinese giant Alibaba. Michael's previous
experience includes starting AOL's Broadband division, running sales and marketing at Hearme and Paltalk, co-founding and overseeing Business Development at
Bluelight.com a venture between Softbank, Martha Stewart, Kmart and Yahoo, and working in Accenture's technology and strategy consulting practice where he
co-founded the Internet Center in Palo Alto some 16 years ago.
Shannon Chircop – Office Manager |
Shannon oversees the day-to-day operations at Founders Den including office management, leasing, facilities and event coordination. Previously, Shannon
worked as a marketing specialist for Cassidy Turley BT Commercial where she contributed to the completion of over 117 commercial real estate transactions
worth over $240 million. Shannon is an active member of the Junior League of Palo Alto-Mid Peninsula.
Advisors
Dennis Crowley |
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Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of foursquare, a service that combines social networks, location awareness
and game mechanics to encourage people explore the world around them. Previously, Dennis founded
dodgeball.com, one of the first mobile social services in the US, which was acquired by Google in 2005. He
has been named one of the "Top 35 Innovators Under 35" by MIT's Technology Review magazine (2005), one of
Fortune's "40 Under 40" (2010) and has won the "Fast Money" bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud
(2009). He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).
Drew Houston |
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Drew Houston is the cofounder and CEO of Dropbox, the leading way to store and share files online. The
company launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008 and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.
Drew was named one of the top "Twenty-something Entrepreneurs" by BusinessWeek in April 2008. Before founding
Dropbox, he was a lead software engineer at Bit9, a venture-backed network security company, cofounded a
profitable online SAT prep company called Accolade, and held engineering roles in various startups since the
age of 14.
Elad is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies such as AirBnB, Pinterest, Square, Stripe. He is currently
working on a new company.
Previously, he was the VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, as well as ran various product teams (Geo, Search).
Elad joined Twitter via the acquisition of MixerLabs, a company he was co-founder and CEO of. MixerLabs ran GeoAPI, one of the early developer-centric
platform infrastructure products.
Elad also spent many years at Google, where he started the mobile team and was involved in all aspects of getting the team up and running. Involved with 3
acquisitions (including the Android team) and was the original product manager for Google Mobile Maps and other key mobile products.
Prior to Google, Elad had product management and market seeding roles at a number of Silicon Valley companies and worked at McKinsey & Co. Elad received his
Ph.D. from MIT and has degrees in Mathematics and Biology from UCSD.
Ethan Beard |
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Ethan Beard serves as Director of the Facebook Developer Network, where he oversees worldwide developer
relations and marketing for Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. He previously served as Director of
Business Development at Facebook and led the team responsible for creating and managing strategic
partnerships. Ethan joined Facebook from Google, where he served as Director of Social Media and Director of
New Business Development. Prior to Google, he spent several years as Director of Business Development for MTV
Online.
Gil Penchina |
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Gil Penchina is currently CEO of Wikia Inc., a start-up founded by Jimmy Wales, the creator of
Wikipedia. He was formerly vice president and general manager, international at eBay.
An active angel investor, he has investments or advisory roles with many internet startups including
Linkedin, Flock, Wink, Become.com, Vamoose, Paypal, Findwhat, Evite, Betzip, Qype, Bounty,
Feedster, Koders, Voicestar, Reify, Properazzi, Healthtap, Coveroo, and MashLogic.
Heather Harde |
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Heather Harde is the former CEO of TechCrunch and General Manager of AOL's technology properties (which include Engadget, Joystiq, and TUAW). She joined
TechCrunch in 2007, built it into the leading tech news site, with a thriving conference business, and sold it to AOL in September, 2010.
She spent the previous ten years working within News Corporation. She held a variety of corporate development, strategy and operating roles both in Los
Angeles and New York. Most recently, she was part of the founding team at Fox Interactive Media and their SVP Mergers & Acquisitions. Her team spent over $1.3
billion on eight acquisitions and two equity deals during her tenure. Their acquisitions spanned pre-launch start-ups all the way through public-company and
pre-IPO buyouts.
James Hong was the co-founder of HOTorNOT.com, a website where users submit their picture for others to rate
on a scale of 1 to 10. Having raised no angel or venture funding, James and his co-founder famously built the
site up to millions per year in earnings while working out of their living room without any employees. After
operating the site for 8 years, the site was sold in 2008. James is also an active angel investor and advisor
to companies including Blippy, Cardpool, Slide, Mochi Media, Raptr, Simply Hired, Crunchyroll, Social
Concepts, and BitTorrent.
Jay Adelson |
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Jay Adelson is the the former CEO of Digg, Inc. and Chairman and Founder of Revision3 Corporation.
Jay helped launch Digg with Kevin Rose and provided business strategy to the company starting in
October, 2004. He assumed the role of full time CEO officially when he resigned from Equinix in
October, 2005.
Jay also co-founded Revision3 with Kevin Rose, and co-founded Equinix in 1998 with Al Avery. Jay was
responsible for the original and sustaining business model which lead to Equinix becoming a multi-billion
dollar international company.
Justin Kan |
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Justin Kan is a founder and President of Justin.tv, the web's leading live video site which lets anyone
broadcast and watch live video with chat for free. He currently serves as Justin.tv's Chief Product Officer,
managing the product and technical teams, recruiting talent for the company, and evangelizing Justin.tv's
website and API.
Previously to founding Justin.tv, Justin founded Kiko Software, the first AJAX-enabled web calendar. Kiko was
a ground breaking product in bringing usable office tools, traditionally restricted to the desktop, to the
web. Kiko was sold to Tucows in 2006.
Keith Rabois is currently the General Manager of Square.
Keith was formerly Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for Slide (acquired by Google). Prior to Slide, Keith served as Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at LinkedIn. Earlier in
his career, Keith served as Executive Vice President of Business Development and Policy for PayPal.
He currently serves on the board of directors of Yelp, Xoom, Vendio, and FanIQ. He was an early investor in
YouTube and LinkedIn, and is a limited partner at Sequoia Capital.
Kim Polese |
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Kim Polese most recently served as CEO of software company SpikeSource Inc. which pioneered the automation of
open source software management, accelerating application deployment for developers globally. SpikeSource was
acquired by open source software leader Black Duck in November 2010. Prior to SpikeSource, Kim co-founded
Marimba Inc. Kim served as President, CEO and Chairman of Marimba, leading the company to profitability and a
successful public offering and acquisition by BMC Corporation in 2004. Earlier, Kim worked at Sun
Microsystems where she was the founding product manager for Java and led its launch in 1995.
Michael Birch |
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Michael Birch is the Co-founder of Bebo and Birthday Alarm.
Birch was raised in North London, England, went to Imperial College, London in Central London (where he met
Xochi, his wife), then worked in West London. After finally deciding that he had done London, Michael moved
to San Francisco in 2002.
Michael and Xochi Birch sold Bebo to AOL in March 2008 for USD 850 million. Their combined 70% stake yielded
a profit of $595 million from the deal.
Michael is an investor in MyStore.com, Goodreads, BranchOut, PlacePop, Mixpanel, Scoopler, and Eventbrite.
Michael Marquez is a founding partner of CODE Advisors.
Previously he was the Executive Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development for CBS Interactive.
Marquez previously served as Director of Corporate Development at Yahoo, working directly with its executive
management team on all acquisitions, investments and major strategic initiatives. In this role, Marquez
played a leading role in the acquisition of 15 companies throughout the world, including Oddpost, Verdisoft,
del.icio.us, Bix and Jumpcut.
Niniane Wang |
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Niniane serves as CTO of Minted, a social commerce site and design marketplace which crowd-sources graphic designs and art from a global community and sells
those as printed paper products Previously Niniane spent over a decade leading engineering teams at Google and Microsoft. She was on the founding team of
Desktop Search, for which she won a Google Founder's Award. She also led Gmail Ads, founded Google Lively, and was previously an engineering manager on
Microsoft Flight Simulator. Niniane is an inventor on 30 patents, filed and pending. She holds a MS in computer science from University of Washington, and a
BS in computer science from Caltech, which she received at age 18.
Phil Libin |
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Phil Libin is the CEO of Evernote, the service that's helping millions of people worldwide remember
everything of value in their daily lives. He is an entrepreneur and executive who has led two Internet
companies from the very beginning to proven commercial success, and helped three others through rapid growth.
Prior to joining Evernote, Phil founded and served as president of CoreStreet, currently one of the top
companies providing smart credential and identity management technologies to governments and large
corporations throughout the world.
Philip Kaplan is the co-founder of Blippy. Prior to Blippy, Philip was an entrepreneur-in-residence at
Charles River Ventures. Prior to CRV, Philip founded AdBrite, one of the largest Internet ad networks, where
he was CEO and remains chairman. Philip founded several other businesses including Fuckedcompany.com and PK
Interactive, a software company that developed web-based applications for Fortune 500 clients.
In 1995, Philip Rosedale created an innovative Internet video conferencing product (called "FreeVue"), which was later acquired by RealNetworks where (in
1996) he went on to become Vice President and CTO. In 1999, Rosedale left RealNetworks, founded Linden Lab and built a virtual civilization called Second
Life, fulfilling his lifelong dream of creating an open-ended, Internet-connected virtual world. In 2006, he and Linden Lab received WIRED's Rave Award for
Innovation in Business. Since leaving Second Life, Rosedale is working on several new experiments in distributed work and computing, including Coffee & Power
and Worklist.net.
Rick is the Founder & CEO of BranchOut (backed by Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Mike Maples).
BranchOut brings career networking to Facebook.
Previously, Rick was the Founder & CEO of SuperFan, a social entertainment platform that
developed social games and Facebook apps. SuperFan's clients included CBS, MTV, Universal Music, Warner
Music, Sony, etc.
Prior to SuperFan, Rick was the Co-Founder and Chief Strategist of Tickle. Rick
served on the Board of Directors of Tickle until 2004 when Tickle was successfully acquired by Monster
Worldwide for over $100 million.
Rusty Rueff |
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Rusty was CEO of SNOCAP until its sale to imeem in April 2008. Prior Rusty was an EVP for seven years at
Electronic Arts. He is an investor and advisor to early stage entertainment and creator resources companies
like RootMusic, Rethink Books, PROJECT X, UrbanTag and Spiral Staircase Productions. He sits on the Boards
of Glassdoor.com and HireVue. He is the co-author of the book "Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human
Side of Business". He also is President of the Board of the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) and Vice-
Chair of the GRAMMY Foundation.
Shervin Pishevar is the founder and executive chairman of SGN, one of the leading social and mobile gaming
companies. Currently, Shervin is an active angel investor or advisor in such companies as Aardvark,
Thread.com, Gowalla, Kissmetrics, Rapportive, Qwiki, and Tello.
Previously, Shervin was the founding president and COO of Webs (formerly Freewebs), one of the largest social
publishing communities in the world.
Shervin was a member of the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) policy working group that helped
create the Obama Technology and Innovation Plan.
Tim Ferriss is author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller, "The 4-Hour
Workweek," as well as the #1 New York Times bestseller, "The 4-Hour Body."
He has been a guest lecturer in high-tech entrepreneurship at Princeton University (High-Tech
Entrepreneurship) since 2003 and was nominated as one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Business People of
2007."
Tim is an angel investor in companies including Digg, SimpleGeo, Foodzie, Posterous, RescueTime, and Twitter,
and an advisor to startups like BranchOut, StumbleUpon, Shopify, DailyBurn, and Evernote.
Yves Behar |
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Yves Behar is the founder of fuseproject, a San Francisco based design agency contributing to areas that
include technology, furniture, sports, lifestyle and fashion. Yves Behar has produced some of the new
millennium's most coveted objects, like the Leaf lamp, the Jawbone headset, and the XO laptop for One Laptop
per Child. Over the past decade, Yves Behar and his firm fuseproject have become the design group that
companies turn to for a game-changing idea. Take the re-invention of the Bluetooth headset, for one; or the
re-envigoration of the venerable but dowdy Birkenstock line; or Behar's LED-chic Leaf lamp for Herman Miller.
And yes, Behar and fuseproject are the people who put the green bunny ears on the XO laptop.
