Howard L. Morgan

Last updated
Howard L. Morgan
Howard L. Morgan (2010).jpg
Howard Morgan (portrait) in 2010.
Born (1945-11-14) November 14, 1945 (age 78)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Education City College of New York
Cornell University
Occupation(s) Businessperson; chief executive officer; professor (former)
SpouseEleanor Morgan (present)
Children3 [1]
Parent(s)Nat Morgan
Esther Hyman Morgan
Website First Round Capital

Howard Lee Morgan (born November 14, 1945) is an American venture capitalist, philanthropist, angel investor, author, and contributor to Business Insider . [2] [3] He also serves as the chairman, CEO, director, board member or advisor for an assortment of companies including B Cap Group, [4] Arca Group, Idealab, and Math for America. [5] He has been listed on the Forbes 2009 list of Executives and Directors, [6] was ranked #12 on CouldAve's Top 30 Most Respected Venture Capitalist for 2011 [7] and #1 in Philadelphia. [6] [8]

Contents

Early life

Howard Morgan attended the City College of the City University of New York in 1965 where he earned a Bachelor of Science in physics. He then received a Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University in 1968. Morgan was also awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree in 1974 from the University of Pennsylvania. [9]

Career

Academic career (1968–1985)

After earning his Ph.D. from Cornell University, Morgan was granted a faculty position with their Department of Computer Science in September 1968. [10] He went on to work as Professor of Decision Sciences at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and also Professor of Computer Science at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania. [9] During his academic career Morgan also served as an editor of Communications of the ACM, Management Science, Transactions on Office Information Systems and Transactions on Database Systems. His research on user interface technology, and on optimization of computer networks led to his bringing the ARPAnet to Philadelphia in 1974. As a result of this early participation in the Internet, he advised many corporate and government agencies on the uses of electronic and voice mail, implementing it throughout the Wharton School in the mid-1970s. Morgan continued to work as a professor from 1972 through 1985. [9] [11]

Entrepreneurship

Howard Morgan's decision to transition from class to corporate capital was based on the technological expansions of the 1980s. The private sector of the time saw small startups like Microsoft make billions and potential for other revolutions in the industry were just as possible.

In 1982 he was one of the original team members at Renaissance Technologies Corp., founded by James Simons. And from 1983 to 1989 served as president where he supervised venture capital investments in high technology companies. He was also a founding board member and technical advisor of Franklin Electronic Publishers, one of the first manufacturers of personal computers, before its sale. He has been an active consultant and speaker to users and vendors in the information systems area for more than 30 years, and has worked with many of the Fortune 100 companies and numerous government agencies.

Authorship

After working with the Association for Computing Machinery, he was published continuously in a number of their publications from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The notice from his work in the early stages of the Internet prompted Morgan to begin authoring a number of his own books on the subject. Since the early 1970s to the present, he has published many books ranging from computer science, business investment, and marketing.

Books

Venture capital

Since 1989, he has been president of the Arca Group, Inc., a consulting and venture capital investment management firm specializing in the area of computer and communications technologies. Arca Group nurtures ventures and has taken them from seed stage through initial public offerings, including MetaCreations Corporation (now Viewpoint Corporation), a computer graphics software company, Infonautics Corporation( now Tucows), which provides search products and services on the internet and MyPoints.com, Inc.(now part of United AirLines New ventures) – the leading direct e-mail provider.

He has been involved in more than three dozen startups and was a lead investor in the formation of Bill Gross’s Idealab, a Pasadena based incubator for internet companies. Idealab also founded Internet Brands which operates many media and e-commerce websites. Howard Morgan served as a board member on Internet Brands until the media company was acquired in December 2010 by Hellman & Friedman for a reported $640 million. [14] [15] [16]

In 2004 Morgan partnered with Josh Kopelman to form the venture capital firm, First Round Capital, later adding Chris Fralic and Rob Hayes as partners. The group specialized in providing seed-stage funds to technology companies. The Philadelphia-based firm is reported to provide seed-stage investments that have ranged between $250,000 to $500,000. [17] In addition, the company has backed companies including Uber, Roblox, Upstart, Planet.com, Climate Corp, Augury Technologies, Outright, LinkedIn, SkillSlate and several hundred other firms. [18] [19] He is also an investor and advisor to over a dozen diverse venture funds, including 645 Ventures, Moxxie Ventures and others.

In 2017, after retiring from First Round Capital, Morgan joined B Cap Group as chairman, where he oversees the firm's investment, product strategy, partnership and development efforts. [20] [21] In 2022, B Capital raised $250 million to form the Ascent Fund for investment in early stage startups. [22]

Morgan was ranked #12 in the 2011's Top 30 Most Respected Venture Capitalist. [7] [8]

Philanthropy

After receiving the Entrepreneur of the Year award in 1997, Howard Morgan and his wife Eleanor decided to establish the Eleanor and Howard Morgan Foundation. [23] [24] Their foundation has since made many contributions to a host of other charities including but not limited to the Chabad on Campus International Foundation, [25] Math for America, [26] Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Public Radio station WNYC and many more over the years. They also helped to fund the 90-minute television program in 2002 entitled 'New York in Song' which featured great songs and obscure songs about New York to raise funds to provide college scholarships for children of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. [27] In 2022, Morgan provided funding to Cornell University for two Eleanor and Howard Morgan Professorships. [28] In 2022, Morgan was named Chairman of the Mabel Mercer Foundation. [29]

Family

Howard Morgan is married to Eleanor Morgan, an interior designer in Villanova and New York. They have three daughters, Kimberly, Elizabeth, and Danielle.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vinod Khosla</span> Indian-American businessman (born 1955)

Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Venture capital</span> Form of private-equity financing

Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc.. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nat Goldhaber</span> American politician

A. Nathaniel ("Nat") Goldhaber is an American venture capitalist, computer entrepreneur and politician. Goldhaber helped found Maharishi International University and was special assistant to lieutenant governor William Scranton III and founder and chief executive of TOPS, a computer networking company. He served as president of the venture capital firm Cole Gilburne Goldhaber & Ariyoshi Management and was the founding CEO of CyberGold, an Internet marketing company that became a public stock offering in 1999. He was the 2000 U.S. vice president candidate for the Natural Law Party and serves as the managing director of Claremont Creek Ventures, an investment firm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mayfield (company)</span> Venture capital firm

Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California, it is one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital firms.

Ronald Terry Burr is an American Internet and media entrepreneur, based in Los Angeles, CA. He is the holder of nine internet patents and the co-founder and original chief executive officer of NetZero. During his career he has created over $1 Billion in value for shareholders. Burr was named by InfoWorld as one of the Top 50 IT executives at xSP's, by Interactive Week as one of the 25 Top Unsung Hero's of the Net and was a finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year award. Burr was also the chief executive officer of online advertising company WebVisible, Inc. until its closure in 2011 due to unpaid debts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred Wilson (financier)</span> American venture capitalist and blogger

Fred Wilson is an American businessman, venture capitalist and blogger. Wilson is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, Etsy and MongoDB.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wesley Chan</span> American investor, innovator (b. 1978)

Wesley Chan is an American venture capitalist and the co-founder and managing partner of venture capital firm FPV. A graduate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chan first became known from his work in the early days of Google, founding Google Analytics and Google Voice, and for building Google's early advertising system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Early history of private equity</span>

The early history of private equity relates to one of the major periods in the history of private equity and venture capital. Within the broader private equity industry, two distinct sub-industries, leveraged buyouts and venture capital experienced growth along parallel although interrelated tracks.

Polaris Partners is a venture capital firm active in the field of healthcare and biotechnology companies. The company has offices in Boston, Massachusetts, New York, NY and San Francisco, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Dixon</span> American tech entrepreneur, investor

Chris Dixon is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and previously worked at eBay. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Hunch. He was #1 on the Midas List in 2022. Dixon is known as a cryptocurrency and Web3 evangelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GV (company)</span> Venture capital unit of Alphabet Inc.

GV Management Company, L.L.C. is a venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc., founded by Bill Maris, that provides seed, venture, and growth stage funding to technology companies. Founded as Google Ventures in 2010, the firm has operated independently of Google, Alphabet's search and advertising division, since 2015. GV invests in startup companies in a variety of fields ranging from the Internet, software, and hardware to life science, healthcare, artificial intelligence, transportation, cyber security and agriculture. It has helped finance more than 300 companies that include Uber, Nest, Slack, and Flatiron Health.

Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.

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

Sashi Parvatha Reddi is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and a philanthropist. Sashi Reddi was the CEO and founder of AppLabs. Sashi Reddi was born in Madras, India and later migrated to the US. He grew up in Guntur but attended boarding school at Lawrence School, Lovedale. He is a recipient of the Louis Braille Award from the Pennsylvania Council for the Blind, for the year 2017. He currently sits on the advisory board of the Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs and the advisory board of IIT Hyderabad.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Breyer</span> American venture capitalist (born 1961)

James W. Breyer is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. Breyer has invested in over 40 companies that have gone public or completed a merger, with some of these investments, including Facebook, earning over 100 times cost and many others over 25 times cost. On the Forbes 2021 list of the 400 richest Americans, he was ranked #389, with a net worth of US$2.9 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave McClure</span> Entrepreneur and angel investor

David "Dave" McClure is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who founded the business accelerator 500 Startups ,and served as its CEO until his resignation in 2017. He founded Practical Venture Capital soon after, a new venture capital fund that would continue to work with companies he previously funded through 500 Startups.

Clifford Todd Boro is an American entrepreneur and startup investor. He is best known as cofounder and former CEO of KidZui, a child-oriented Internet browser and search engine. Saban Brands bought Zui.com in September 2012. He founded Internet Financial Network. AOL Time Warner bought Infogate in March 2003. He is cofounder and managing partner of The Team Group, LLC, a technology startup/accelerator investment group. In addition, he has been chief executive officer, board member and cofounder at several other firms, including Internet Financial Network (Infogate), VideoEgg, mSnap and CVT Ventures, LLC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Lenet</span> American venture capitalist

Scott Harris Lenet is an American venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of two venture capital firms: the corporate venture capital firm Touchdown Ventures and the seed stage venture capital firm DFJ Frontier.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unicorn (finance)</span> Startup company valued at over $1 billion

In business, a unicorn is a startup company valued at over US$1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market. The term was first published in 2013, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.

A startup studio, also known as a startup factory, or a startup foundry, or a venture studio, is a studio-like company that aims at building several startup companies in succession. This style of business building is referred to as "parallel entrepreneurship".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gayle Jennings-O'Byrne</span> American venture capitalist

Gayle Jennings-O'Byrne is a venture capitalist and founder of the WOCstar Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in women of color (“WOC”) and diverse inclusive teams in the tech sector. She is best known for her work to empower women of color startups and help build wealth in communities of color and diversity. Her management and consulting company managed the iNTENT Manifesto campaign to mobilize women startups and allies across the globe.

References

  1. ↑ "Morgan Family". ausum.com. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
  2. ↑ "A New York VC Spotlight: Howard Morgan, First Round Capital". AlleyWatch. Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  3. ↑ "Business Insider Profile Howard Morgan". Business Insider. June 3, 2009. Retrieved 2010-02-18.
  4. ↑ Merced, Michael J. de la (2017-10-23). "B Capital Hires Howard L. Morgan as Its New Chairman". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-11-01.
  5. ↑ "Profile Howard Morgan". Business Week . June 3, 2009. Archived from the original on October 10, 2012. Retrieved 2017-07-09.
  6. 1 2 "Howard L. Morgan". Forbes . June 3, 2009. Archived from the original on May 4, 2009. Retrieved 2010-02-18.
  7. 1 2 "Top 30 Most Respected Venture Capitalist". CloudAve. February 3, 2011. Retrieved 2010-02-18.
  8. 1 2 "Editor's Eye on Philadelphia: A Round of Applause for First Round's Morgan, Fralic and Kopelman". CityBizlist. February 3, 2011. Archived from the original on July 8, 2011. Retrieved 2010-02-18.
  9. 1 2 3 "Howard Morgan Bio". ausum.com. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
  10. ↑ Annual report to the President. Vol. 2. Cornell University. 1967. p. 8.
  11. ↑ Communications of the ACM. Vol. 24. ACM. 1981. pp. 7, 38, 348.
  12. ↑ Office of the Future Seminar. CIA. 1979. p. 198.
  13. ↑ The Future of the Office of the Future (PDF). Department of Decision Sciences. 1980. p. 198. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-02-17.
  14. ↑ Schroeder, Stan (21 September 2010). "Internet Brands Acquired for $640 Million". Mashable .
  15. ↑ "Internet Brands to be acquired for $640 mln". Reuters. 20 September 2010.
  16. ↑ Wauters, Robin (20 September 2010). "Private Equity Firm Acquires Internet Brands In $640 Million Deal".
  17. ↑ Halft, Miguel (2006-11-09). "For Start-Ups, Web Success on the Cheap". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-02-23.
  18. ↑ "Online bookkeeping startup Outright raises $5.5M - Silicon Valley Business Journal".
  19. ↑ Barbierri, Cody (2010-10-20). "SkillSlate Grabs 11M to Find Local Service Providers". The New York Times.
  20. ↑ Merced, Michael J. de la (2017-10-23). "B Capital Hires Howard L. Morgan as Its New Chairman" . The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-11-01.
  21. ↑ "The Elusive $1 Billion Fund That's Rattled Venture Capital". Yahoo! Finance. Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  22. ↑ "Eduardo Saverin's B Capital Raises Its First Early-Stage VC Fund". Bloomberg. Retrieved 17 August 2022.
  23. ↑ "NCCS Organization Profile – Eleanor and Howard Morgan Family Foundation (232868322)". Archived from the original on 2011-07-25. Retrieved 2011-03-03.
  24. ↑ "Eleanor And Howard Morgan Family Foundation in Villanova, Pennsylvania (PA) – NonProfitFacts.com".
  25. ↑ Chabad on Campus International Foundation 2010 annual report
  26. ↑ "Math for America Sponsors". Archived from the original on 2010-12-27. Retrieved 2011-03-03.
  27. ↑ "CABARET HOTLINE BREAKING NEWS – NY IN SONG TV SHOW".
  28. ↑ "New Gift Endows Morgan Chair to Operations Research Professor". 26 January 2022. Retrieved 28 March 2022.
  29. ↑ "Board of Trustees". Mabel Mercer. Retrieved 30 March 2022.
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.