David Cowan (venture capitalist)

Last updated
David Cowan
David Smiling.jpg
David Cowan 2022
Occupation(s)Venture Capitalist, Entrepreneur

David Cowan is a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, filmmaker, philanthropist, and company founder. He is in the Forbes Midas List Hall of Fame and has appeared on the Midas List 14 times since 2001. [1] [2] He co-founded three companies, including Verisign. He has invested in more than 29 companies that have gone on to IPO. [1] He is also noted for his support of scientific skepticism and of the work of Richard Dawkins and as of 2022 a board member of Center for Inquiry.

Contents

Early life and education

Cowan was raised in New Rochelle, New York. [3] He earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Harvard University in 1988. [1] He received his MBA from Harvard in 1992. [1]

Career

Venture capital and entrepreneurship

Cowan joined Bessemer Venture Partners in 1992. His notable investments there include LinkedIn, Qualys, Twitch, Twilio, Rocket Lab, Skybox Imaging, Blue Nile, Verisign, Ciena, LifeLock, Auth0, [4] Zapier, [5] Rigetti, and Spire Global. Of his investments, 29 have gone on to IPO. [1] Bessemer was Twilio’s largest shareholder at the time of its 2016 IPO, [6] a stake worth over $500 million. [1]

In 1995, Cowan co-founded network infrastructure company Verisign and served as its initial chairman. [7] The company went public in 1998 and is currently traded on NASDAQ. [8]

In 1996, Cowan co-founded mobile email software platform Visto, serving as its initial CEO. Visto later purchased Good Technology and the merged company was acquired by Blackberry in 2015. [9]

In 2012, Cowan co-founded DDOS prevention firm Defense.Net. [10] [11] It was acquired by F5 Networks in 2014. [12]

He served on the Board of Auth0, which was acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion; Bessemer owned greater than 20% of the company at that time, [13] generating over $1.2 billion in gains for the firm. [14]

Other professional activities

In 2006, Cowan published a blog post questioning claims made regarding the dietary supplement Airborne, which he alleged was improperly marketed as a cold remedy. [15] Cowan’s blog post became the primary source for a Scientific American article, [16] which in turn led to a lawsuit against Airborne that caused significant marketing changes and a $23.5 million fine by the Federal Trade Commission. [17] [18]

Cowan holds several United States patents, including patents regarding consumer behavior (assigned to Groupon following the acquisition of MashLogic) [19] and network security. [20]

Professional awards and recognition

Creative Works

Cowan wrote and directed the musical “Lies in the Attic,” which was performed by a capella group Voices in Harmony four times in San Jose alongside other cast members. [24] He co-wrote and starred in the Silicon Valley mockumentary “Bubbleproof,” which was produced by the Femtofilm project in 2017. [25] [26] Cowan was Executive Producer of the David Greenwald-directed documentary The Blech Effect, released in 2020. [27]

Cowan was also the Producer of Afghan Dreamers, a documentary about five girls in Afghanistan who were part of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, an internationally competitive robotics team. [28] [29] Afghan Dreamers won the Best Human Rights Film Award at Galway Film Fleadh, [30] Best Documentary Audience Award at Valladolid, [31] [32] Best Inspirational Storytelling at Savannah Film Fest, [33] and Honorable Mention for Best Documentary Feature at the 2022 Woodstock Film Festival. [34] In 2022, it joined the MTV Documentary Films slate licensed by Paramount/Viacom. [35] In 2023, it was announced that it would exclusively premiere on May 23 on Paramount+. [36]

Philanthropy

Cowan founded the Afghan Rescue Fund, an organization that works to assist and relocate Afghan families and individuals imperiled by the upheaval in Afghanistan and the Taliban regime. Cowan himself has coordinated the rescue of hundreds of endangered Afghans to date. [37]

Cowan previously served as a Trustee of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science before it merged with the Center for Inquiry. [38] He serves as a board member of the merged organization. [39] He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian as of 2022. [40]

Personal life

Cowan is the brother of former New York Times reporter Alison Leigh Cowan. [41] He identifies as atheist. [42]

See also

Related Research Articles

The Forbes Midas list is the annual ranking by Forbes magazine of the most influential and best-performing venture capital investors. Described by Kara Swisher as the "Oscars for venture capitalists in tech," the Midas List uses parameters that include the first-day market capitalization of IPOs and the opinions of a panel of experts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Sacca</span> American businessman

Christopher Sacca is an American venture investor, company advisor, entrepreneur, and lawyer. He is the proprietor of Lowercase Capital, a venture capital fund in the United States that has invested in seed and early-stage technology companies such as Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter, investments that resulted in his placement as No. 2 on Forbes' Midas List: Top Tech Investors for 2017. Sacca held several positions at Google Inc., where he led the alternative access and wireless divisions and worked on mergers and acquisitions. Between 2015 and 2020, he appeared as a "Guest Shark" on ABC's Shark Tank. In early 2017, Sacca announced that he was retiring from venture investing. In 2021, Sacca announced that he was back into venture investing with a focus on Climate issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Index Ventures</span> European worldwide venture capital firm

Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Insight Partners</span> American investment manager

Insight Partners is a global venture capital and private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology, software, and Internet businesses. The company is headquartered in New York City, with offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Palo Alto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knewton</span>

Knewton is an adaptive learning company that has developed a platform to personalize educational content as well as has developed courseware for higher education concentrated in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The company was founded in 2008 by Jose Ferreira, a former executive at Kaplan, Inc. The Knewton platform allows schools, publishers, and developers to provide adaptive learning for any student. In 2011, Knewton announced a partnership with Pearson Education to enhance the company's digital content, including the MyLab and Mastering series. Additional partners announced include Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan Education, Triumph Learning, and over a dozen others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bain Capital Ventures</span> American venture capital division within Bain Capital

Bain Capital Ventures LLC is the venture capital division within Bain Capital, which has approximately $160 billion of assets under management worldwide. The firm's early-stage investments have included Attentive, Bloomreach, Billtrust, Docusign, Flywire, LinkedIn, Justworks, Turbonomic, Rent the Runway, Twilio, Rapid7, and Redis. Bain Capital Ventures manages $10 billion of committed capital, has over 400 active portfolio companies, and has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, and San Francisco.

James J. Goetz is an American venture capitalist and businessman who is a partner with Sequoia Capital. Goetz is known for his focus on mobile and enterprise startups, including successful investments in AdMob, WhatsApp, Chartboost and GitHub. In 2017, Goetz announced he was stepping back from his leadership role with Sequoia, but continues to invest and represent the firm on company boards.

Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danny Rimer</span>

Danny Rimer OBE is a partner at Index Ventures, a global venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1992. Rimer opened the firm's London office in 2002 and its San Francisco office in 2012. He has become a leading voice on venture capital in Silicon Valley and Europe, and has been actively involved in various philanthropic and cultural activities.

Twilio is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SendGrid</span> Email delivery service

SendGrid is a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email. The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the Techstars accelerator program. As of 2017, SendGrid has raised over $81 million and has offices in Denver, Colorado; Boulder, Colorado; Irvine, California; Redwood City, California; and London.

Virtru is a global data encryption and digital privacy provider founded in 2012. The company is headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Sapphire Ventures is a venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Austin, and London. The firm is considered one of the world's premier venture capital firms.

Lowercase Capital is an American venture capital firm that provided seed and early stage funding for a number of successful startups including Twitter, Twilio, Kickstarter, Uber, Instagram, and Stripe. It raised over $1 billion in capital and sources claim a return of at least $5 billion to its investors.

Josh Stein is an American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a managing partner at Threshold Ventures and was featured in the Forbes Midas List in 2013, 2014 and 2015 in recognition of his accomplishments as an investor. He was also the recipient of the 2015 Deloitte Fast 500 Venture Capitalist of the Year award. Stein holds board responsibilities at Box (company), Chartbeat, LaunchDarkley, LendKey, Lumity, and Talkdesk—and led Box’s first round of institutional investment. He is also an investor in AngelList, Doximity, Front, Loftium, Periscope Data acquired by Sisense, and Rippling.

Procore Technologies is an American construction management software as a service company founded in 2002, with headquarters in Carpinteria, California.

PagerDuty is an American cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Okta, Inc.</span> American information technology company

Okta, Inc. is an American identity and access management company based in San Francisco. It provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications, and for developers to build identity controls into applications, website web services and devices. It was founded in 2009 and had its initial public offering in 2017, being valued at over $6 billion.

Ping Identity Corporation is an American software company established in 2002 by Andre Durand and Bryan Field-Elliot. It is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, United States with development offices in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tel Aviv, Israel, Austin, Texas, Denver, Colorado, Boston, Massachusetts and Edinburgh, Scotland. Ping also has European operations with offices in London, Paris, and Switzerland as well as offices in Bangalore, Melbourne, and Tokyo, serving Asia-pacific. It was a publicly traded company until getting acquired by Thoma Bravo and taken private in October 2022.

Jay Chaudhry is an Indian-American billionaire entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of cloud security company Zscaler.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "David Cowan". Forbes.
  2. 1 2 "The Space Companies Getting A Boost From Midas List Members". Forbes.
  3. ↑ "YU Wall Street Group Hosts Community Events".
  4. ↑ "Auth0 Raises $2.4M to Help Developers Plug into Identity Platforms Like Facebook".
  5. ↑ "Zapier Raises $1.2M Seed Round from Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson & Others".
  6. ↑ "FORM S-1: Twilio Inc".
  7. ↑ Shah, Tarang; Shah, Shital (24 January 2012). Venture Capitalists at Work: How VCs Identify and Build Billion-Dollar Successes. Apress. ISBN   9781430238386 . Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  8. ↑ "VeriSign IPO well-received". CNET. 30 January 1998.
  9. ↑ "BlackBerry to acquire Good Technology for $425 million". CrackBerry.com. 4 September 2015. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  10. ↑ "David Cowan". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  11. ↑ "Cyber Security Expert Barrett Lyon Brings Defense.net Out Of Stealth To Battle A New Wave Of DDoS Attacks – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com.
  12. ↑ Team, Trefis. "F5 Expands Its Security Portolio With Defense.Net". Forbes. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  13. ↑ Chernova, Yuliya (2021-03-05). "Auth0 Backers Projected to See Blockbuster Return From $6.5 Billion Sale to Okta". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2022-08-19.
  14. ↑ Chernova, Yuliya (2021-03-05). "Auth0 Backers Projected to See Blockbuster Return From $6.5 Billion Sale to Okta". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  15. ↑ Cowan, David (19 April 2006). "Who Has Time For This?: CREATED BY A SCHOOL TEACHER!!!!!". Who Has Time For This?. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  16. ↑ Shermer, Michael (2007). "Airborne Baloney". Scientific American. 296 (1): 32. Bibcode:2007SciAm.296a..32S. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0107-32. PMID   17186829 . Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  17. ↑ Shermer, Michael (12 January 2016). Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN   9781627791397.
  18. ↑ "Makers of Airborne Settle FTC Charges of Deceptive Advertising; Agreement Brings Total Settlement Funds to $30 Million". Federal Trade Commission. 14 August 2008. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  19. ↑ US 9489352,"System and method for providing content to users based on interactions by similar other users"
  20. ↑ US 7039679B2,"System and method for globally and securely accessing unified information in a computer network"
  21. ↑ Upbin, Bruce. "Who's Been On The Midas List More Than Anyone?". Forbes. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  22. ↑ Upbin, Bruce. "Who's Been On The Midas List More Than Anyone?". Forbes.
  23. ↑ "Midas List". Forbes. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  24. ↑ "Beatles and barbershop blend in 'Lies in the Attic' musical". The Mercury News. 10 February 2016. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  25. ↑ "David Cowan". IMDb. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  26. ↑ "Silicon Valley mockumentary 'Bubbleproof'". Bubbleproof.TV. Retrieved 27 January 2019.
  27. ↑ "The Blech Effect - Cast | IMDbPro". pro.imdb.com. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  28. ↑ Ravindran, Manori (2021-08-25). "'Afghan Dreamers' Film, on Female Robotics Team, Underway as Producer Describes 'White-Knuckle Panic' Around Evacuation (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  29. ↑ Ide2022-07-07T18:15:00+01:00, Wendy. "'Afghan Dreamers': Galway Review". Screen. Retrieved 2022-12-15.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  30. ↑ ciaraod (2022-07-11). "2022 Award Winners Announced". Galway Film Fleadh. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  31. ↑ Carey, Matthew (2023-05-09). "Paramount+ To Debut 'Afghan Dreamers' May 23, "Harrowing Story" Of All-Girls Robotics Team Menaced By Taliban Rule". Deadline. Retrieved 2023-05-16.
  32. ↑ "Review: Afghan Dreamers / It's Just Movies". itsjustmovies.com. Retrieved 2023-07-02.
  33. ↑ "Film showcases and specialty series". SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Retrieved 2023-05-20.
  34. ↑ "Award Winners from the 23rd Annual Woodstock Film Festival". Woodstock Film Festival. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  35. ↑ "MTV Documentary Films Unveils Full Slate and Trailer for Ondi Timoner's 'Last Flight Home' (EXCLUSIVE)". www.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  36. ↑ Major, Michael. "Paramount+ to Exclusively Debut MTV's AFGHAN DREAMERS Documentary Film". BroadwayWorld.com. Retrieved 2023-05-16.
  37. ↑ kreidler, Marc (2022-04-19). "Afghan Rescue Fund | Secular Rescue" . Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  38. ↑ kreidler, Marc (2016-12-31). "Two Great Freethought Organizations Are Now One | Center for Inquiry" . Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  39. ↑ kreidler, Marc (2018-04-12). "Board | Center for Inquiry" . Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  40. ↑ "Advisory Board | www.cfa.harvard.edu/". 2019-11-07. Archived from the original on 2019-11-07. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
  41. ↑ "Alison Leigh Cowan". The School of The New York Times. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  42. ↑ "Board and Staff: Richard Dawkins Foundation". www.richarddawkins.net. Archived from the original on 1 April 2018. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.