Crystal English Sacca | |
---|---|
Born | Crystal English |
Education | Georgetown University |
Occupation(s) | Angel investor, partner of Lowercase Capital |
Known for | co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital |
Website | CrystalEnglishSacca.com |
Crystal English Sacca is an American venture investor and author. She is known for her work in advertising, her New York Times bestselling book, for being an early investor in Uber and Blue Bottle Coffee through Lowercase Capital, and for her philanthropy.
Sacca attended the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She graduated with a B.S. in Foreign Service.
Through the early 2000s, Sacca worked in advertising, serving as art director to clients such as Audi, Intel, Barclays, HBO, Sprint, and Napster. [1] She received a Cannes Lion, Two Gold Cannes Cyberlions, and other awards. She was named an ADC Young Gun, [2] [3] one of AdWeek’s "Best Creatives You Don’t Know." [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
More recently, she served as producer of the stage production of Mike Birbiglia’s The New One in 2018. [9]
Sacca is a partner at angel investing fund Lowercase Capital and the co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital, a fund dedicated to environmental investing. She co-led early investments in companies including Uber and Blue Bottle. [10]
More recent investments include Linear Labs, a producer of next-generation electric motors. [11] [12]
Sacca has co-authored and designed books on wine and whiskey. Her 2013 wine book, The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert, was a New York Times Bestseller. [13] [14] [15] [16]
The follow-up book, The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All, was published in 2015. [17] [18]
In 2019, Sacca was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. [19] [4]
She is a founding member of The Design Vanguard. The organization describes itself as dedicated to furthering a "more just and beautiful world" through the efforts of creative leaders. [20]
In response to the Trump travel ban (aka "Muslim ban") of 2017, she produced her well-known "Everyone Welcome" painting. [21]
She and spouse Chris Sacca have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give a majority of their wealth to charity. [22] [23]
Sacca is the spouse of Chris Sacca, a former venture investor and founder of Lowercase Capital. They have three daughters together. [24]
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that operate within the Smithsonian Institution and is one of three Smithsonian facilities located in New York City, the other two being the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in Bowling Green and the Archives of American Art New York Research Center in the Flatiron District. Unlike other Smithsonian museums, Cooper Hewitt is not free to the public and charges an admissions fee to visitors. It is the only museum in the United States devoted to historical and contemporary design. Its collections and exhibitions explore approximately 240 years of design aesthetic and creativity.
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.
Rebeca Méndez is a Mexican-American artist and graphic designer. She is professor at UCLA Design Media Arts in Los Angeles, California, and since July 2020 is chair of the department, as well as founder and director of the Counterforce Lab. Her Vice-chair Peter Lunenfeld wrote about her: "Rebeca has won the three most significant awards in the field of design: The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Communication Design, 2012, the AIGA Medal in 2017, and induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2017. This triple crown would be worthy enough on its own, more than worthy, absolutely exceptional, but when you add in that Rebeca is the first and only Latina to win each one of these, much less all three, the achievement is towering." In fact, she is the only woman ever to have received all these three awards, while Bob Greenberg from R/GA is the only man to have received all of them.
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art. Previously she was the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and was named Curator Emerita after 30 years of service. She is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has written numerous books on graphic design for a variety of audiences. She has contributed to several publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., Metropolis, and The New York Times.
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Ivy Ross is an American business executive, jewelry designer, and, since July 2016, vice president of hardware design at Google. She has worked at Google since May 2014; prior to being appointed VP of hardware design, she led the Google Glass team at Google X. Ross's metal work in jewelry design is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. One of few recognized fine artists to successfully cross over into the business world, Ross is also a keynote speaker and a member of several boards, and has been hailed as a “creative visionary” by the art world. In February 2019 she was named one of the 15 Most Powerful Women at Google by Business Insider. In July 2019 she was named #9 on Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business. Ivy is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us with Susan Huganir Magsamen. This book shares the science behind humanities birthright - to make and behold art and its power to amplify physical and mental health, learning and build stronger communities.
Hella Jongerius is a Dutch industrial designer.
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Barbara Abrams Mandel was an American activist and philanthropist. She was named to the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1985. She was elected to two terms as President of the National Council of Jewish Women, which is the oldest Jewish women's organization in the country. Mandel and her husband Morton's operation, the Morton and Barbara Mandel Family Foundation, gave a $10 million gift to the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2014.
Christina Malman was an artist and illustrator, best known for her work for The New Yorker magazine.
Susannah Drake is a practicing architect and landscape architect who specializes in addressing contemporary social and environmental issues through design.
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Suzie Zuzek (1920–2011) was an American artist and textile designer whose work was mainly seen in Lilly Pulitzer dresses, textiles and furnishings from the 1960s to the 1980s, and became exclusively associated with the brand until its closure in 1984. In the early 21st century, she was eventually acknowledged as the creator of some of the most widely recognized textiles of the 1960s and 1970s. A retrospective exhibition of her designs, curated in 2019 and shown in 2021 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, both recognized the impact of her work, and brought her out of obscurity.
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