Alfred Lin | |
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| Born | |
| Alma mater | Harvard University (B.A) Stanford University (M.S.) |
| Occupation | Partner at Sequoia Capital |
| Spouse | Rebecca |
| Children | Atticus Lin (Son) |
Alfred Lin is an American venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. [2] [3] [4] Lin was the COO, CFO, and Chairman of Zappos.com until 2010. [5] [6]
Lin was born in Taiwan. At the age of six or seven, his parents immigrated to the New York area. [7] Lin attended the Stuyvesant High School in New York City[ citation needed ]. He holds a B.A. in applied mathematics from Harvard and a M.S. in statistics from Stanford.[ citation needed ] While at Harvard, Lin met Tony Hsieh, the future CEO of Zappos. [7] Hsieh first recognized Lin's business acumen while running a student-owned pizza parlor at Harvard. Lin, his best customer, was buying whole pizzas, splitting them into slices, and selling them for a profit. [7] In 1996, Lin dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford to join Hsieh, Sanjay Mandan, and Ali Partovi at LinkExchange as CFO. [2] 18 months later LinkExchange sold to Microsoft for $265 million. [8] Later, before joining Zappos, Lin was the VP of Finance and Business Development of Tellme Networks (MSFT). With Tony Hsieh he also co-founded Venture Frogs, an incubator and investment firm. [9] Venture Frogs invested in a variety of tech and Internet startups, including Ask Jeeves, OpenTable, Tellme Networks, and Zappos. [10]
From 2005 to 2010, Lin was chairman, COO, and CFO.[ citation needed ] At Zappos, Lin was responsible for all financial, administrative, and warehouse operations. [11] He was also responsible for company growth and scaling, bringing the company to its first profitable year in 2006 and to Amazon.com's acquisition of the company in 2009 for $1.2 billion. [3] [12] [13] [14] According to TechCrunch , "Hsieh made at least $214 million; Lin made at least $18 million, with the Venture Frogs shares netting an additional $163 million." [15]
Lin left Zappos in 2010 to join the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as a partner. [16]
TechCrunch has stated that Alfred has the "Midas touch", since "every company he's worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 million." [2] Lin later helped Tellme Networks which was sold to Microsoft for $800 million. [17] After that, Lin helped form Zappos to later be acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion. Lin has invested in Airbnb, Achievers, Stella & Dot, Houzz, Humble Bundle, Kiwi, Romotive, Moovit, Styleseat, Uber, and Cardpool (acquired by Blackhawk Networks), AppBistro / MMTG Labs (acquired by InMobi), and SalesCrunch (acquired by ClearSlide). [18] [19] [20] He specializes in consumer internet, enterprise and mobile companies. [21]
Lin was an early investor in Zipline, a medicine drone delivery company with operations in Rwanda. [22] He also invested in the Palo Alto-based security company Cobalt Robotics, and sits on its board of directors. [23]
In 2013, Forbes named Lin as one of the "30 Most Influential People in Tech". [24] Lin and his work have been profiled in national publications, including The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , Harvard Business Review , Forbes, BusinessWeek , and Fortune , as well as CNBC. [4] [25] [26] [27]
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, Sequoia's total assets under management were approximately US$85 billion.
Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups.
Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $300 billion by January 2021. The company's accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and has been entirely online since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Forbes characterized the company in 2012 as one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
LinkExchange was a popular Internet advertising cooperative, similar in function to a webring, originally known as Internet Link Exchange or ILE.
Anthony Hsieh was an American internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He retired as the CEO of the online shoe and clothing company Zappos in August 2020 after 21 years. Prior to joining Zappos, Hsieh co-founded the Internet advertising network LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million.
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.
Zappos.com is an American online shoe and clothing retailer based in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. The company was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and launched under the domain name Shoesite.com. In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in an all-stock deal worth around $1.2 billion at the time. Amazon purchased all of the outstanding shares and warrants from Zappos for 10 million shares of Amazon's common stock and provided $40 million in cash and restricted stock for the Zappos employees.
Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional operating funds in London, India and China.
John William Gurley is an American businessman. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. He is listed consistently on the Forbes Midas List and is considered one of technology’s top dealmakers.
Jim Goetz is an American venture capitalist and entrepreneur 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 duties with Sequoia, but continues to invest and represent the firm on company boards.
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (2010) is a book by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. It details his life as an entrepreneur, with emphasis on the founding of LinkExchange and Zappos.
Thumbtack is an American home services website. It is an online directory that allows users to search for, rate, and hire local service providers to work on a variety of personal projects, including home improvement, financial and legal services, and event planning. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Javelin Venture Partners, Baillie Gifford, and Capital G, among others.
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.
NerdWallet is an American personal finance company, founded in 2009 by Tim Chen and Jacob Gibson. It has a website and app that earns money by promoting financial products to its users.
Rothenberg Ventures, known briefly as Frontier Technology Venture Capital, was an American venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2012 by Mike Rothenberg. It invested in more than 100 companies, including Bustle, Robinhood, Revel Systems, and SpaceX, and focused its investments on virtual reality and other frontier technologies. As of January 2021, the firm's status with the California Franchise Tax Board is "forfeited".
Ali Partovi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of Code.org, iLike, LinkExchange, an early advisor at Dropbox, and an early promoter of bid-based search advertising. Partovi currently serves on the board of directors at FoodCorps. He is currently the CEO of Neo, a mentorship community and venture fund he established in 2017.
Emil G. Michael is an Egyptian-born American businessman. Michael was the Senior Vice President of Business and Chief Business Officer at Uber, and the Chief Operating Officer of Klout.
Berkeley SkyDeck (SkyDeck) is a high-tech entrepreneurship startup accelerator and incubator program at the University of California, Berkeley serving as a joint venture between the Haas School of Business and Berkeley College of Engineering. Founded in 2012, SkyDeck promotes high-tech entrepreneurship in the Silicon Valley.
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