David Friedberg | |
---|---|
Born | 1979or1980(age 43–44) South Africa |
Citizenship | South African, American |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
Occupation(s) | Entrepreneur, businessman, angel investor |
David Albert Friedberg (born 1979or1980 [1] ) is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and angel investor. [2] He founded and was chief executive of The Climate Corporation, whose $1.1 billion sale to Monsanto in 2013 made it the first unicorn in the emerging agricultural technology space. [3] [4] He is currently founder and CEO of The Production Board (TPB). He is a co-host of the All-In podcast, alongside David Sacks, Jason Calacanis & Chamath Palihapitiya. Spanning his career, he has contributed to 32 patents. [5]
Friedberg was born c. 1980 in South Africa. [1] At age six, Friedberg moved with his family to Los Angeles, California. [6] In high school, Friedberg was president of the environmental club "Students H.O.P.E." (Students Healing Our Planet Earth). [7] At age 16, he entered Clarkson University, in Potsdam, New York, where he worked in a pool hall and learned to play poker. [1] After one year in upstate New York, he transferred to University of California, Berkeley, where he had a part-time job doing mathematical modeling at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and received a Bachelor's Degree in Astrophysics in 2001. [8]
After several years in investment banking and private equity, Friedberg joined Google in March 2004 as one of the first 1,000 employees and a founding member of Google's Corporate Development group. [9] As Corporate Development and Business Product Manager, Friedberg helped run Google's online advertising platform, AdWords, and negotiated acquisitions and worked with Google co-founder Larry Page. [10]
In 2006, he founded his first company, WeatherBill, to create and buy custom weather insurance online. Friedberg was still working at Google as a business product manager when the idea for the company came to him. [11] He was driving past the Bike Hut in San Francisco and seeing sales slump on rainy days [12] as the thought occurred to him that the impact of weather on a business must be a big problem.
WeatherBill secured funding from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Index Ventures and Atomico. [13] In 2011, Friedberg changed WeatherBill's name to The Climate Corporation. [14] The Climate Corporation focused on offering farmers weather insurance and the climate.com service to help them track, analyze, and make field-specific decisions on their farms to improve farming outcomes. On 5 October 2011, Friedberg gave his Entrepreneurship Gives Life Meaning lecture [15] at Stanford.
In October 2013, Monsanto announced that it was acquiring The Climate Corporation for about $1.1 billion. [16] Friedberg joined Monsanto's Executive Team after the acquisition and in 2016 shifted to an advisory role. [17]
In 2016, Friedberg began talking with Larry Page about a way to build and finance more startups focused on food, agriculture, decarbonization and life sciences. [18] Through parent company Alphabet, Page agreed to help finance a holding company that Friedberg would operate. [19] Friedberg founded The Production Board (TPB) in 2016. [20]
TPB partners with scientists, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs to solve the world's challenges, such as climate change. [21] TPB portfolio businesses include Pattern Ag, Ohalo, Culture Biosciences, Triplebar Bio, Supergut and Cana. [18] In July 2021, Friedberg announced that The Production Board raised $300 million from Alphabet, Baillie Gifford, Allen & Co., BlackRock, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global. [18]
Friedberg founded car insurance firm Metromile in 2011 and served as its chairman during its early years. [22] [23] He is also an angel investor in various technology, food, agriculture, and life sciences startups. In 2014, he purchased Canadian quinoa supplier NorQuin, North America's largest supplier of quinoa. [24] In 2022, Above Food Corp. acquired Norquin [25] and appointed Friedberg to its Innovation Advisory Council. [26]
Friedberg is one of the four co-hosts of All-In, a business and investment podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, David O. Sacks, and Jason Calacanis. [27]
Friedberg is a lifelong vegetarian. [7]
Quinoa is a flowering plant in the amaranth family. It is an herbaceous annual plant grown as a crop primarily for its edible seeds; the seeds are rich in protein, dietary fiber, B vitamins and dietary minerals in amounts greater than in many grains. Quinoa is not a grass but rather a pseudocereal botanically related to spinach and amaranth, and originated in the Andean region of northwestern South America. It was first used to feed livestock 5,200–7,000 years ago, and for human consumption 3,000–4,000 years ago in the Lake Titicaca basin of Peru and Bolivia.
The Monsanto Company was an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation founded in 1901 and headquartered in Creve Coeur, Missouri. Monsanto's best-known product is Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide, developed in the 1970s. Later, the company became a major producer of genetically engineered crops. In 2018, the company ranked 199th on the Fortune 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue.
The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), more informally called the American Farm Bureau (AFB) or simply the Farm Bureau, is a United States-based 501(c)(5) tax-exempt agricultural organization and lobbying group. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Farm Bureau has affiliates in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Each affiliate is a (state or county) Farm Bureau, and the parent organization is also often called simply the Farm Bureau.
L. John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn. In 2017, related to Forbes, he was recognized the 40th Richest in Tech. Forbes ranked Doerr as the 196th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$ 9.8 billion as of April 12, 2023. Doerr is the author of Measure What Matters, a book about goal-setting, and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
G.D. Searle, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Pfizer. It is currently a trademark company and subsidiary of Pfizer, operating in more than 43 countries. It also operates as a distribution trademark for various pharmaceuticals that were developed by G. D. Searle & Company. Searle is most notable for having developed the first female birth control pill, and the artificial sweetener NutraSweet. Searle also developed the drug Lomotil, an antidiarrheal medication. One of the notable Alumni of Searle is Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense for George W. Bush in the 2000s. Prior to its 1985 merger with Monsanto, Searle was a company mainly focusing on life sciences, specifically pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and animal health.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
David Oliver Sacks is an entrepreneur, author and investor in internet technology firms. He serves as the general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Additionally, he is also a cohost of the All In podcast, alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis & David Friedberg. Previously, Sacks was the COO and product leader of PayPal and founder and CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits for 10 months. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb.
Verisk Analytics, Inc. is an American multinational data analytics and risk assessment firm based in Jersey City, New Jersey, with customers in insurance, natural resources, financial services, government, and risk management sectors. The company uses proprietary data sets and industry expertise to provide predictive analytics and decision support consultations in areas including fraud prevention, actuarial science, insurance coverage, fire protection, catastrophe and weather risk, and data management.
A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and legumes.
Ray Sharma is the founding partner and CEO of Extreme Venture Partners, the founder of XMG Studio and a super angel investor.
An evil corporation is a trope in popular culture that portrays a corporation as ignoring social responsibility, morality, ethics, and sometimes laws in order to make profit for its shareholders. In rare cases, the corporation may be well intentioned but extremist, engaging in noble cause corruption.
The Climate Corporation is a digital agriculture company that examines weather, soil and field data to help farmers determine potential yield-limiting factors in their fields.
Natural News is a far-right, anti-vaccination conspiracy theory and fake news website known for promoting alternative medicine, pseudoscience, disinformation, and far-right extremism. The website began publishing articles in 2008 and is based in the United States.
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist, engineer, SPAC sponsor, founder and CEO of Social Capital. Palihapitiya was an early senior executive at Facebook, working at the company from 2007 to 2011. Following his departure from Facebook, Palihapitiya started his fund, The Social+Capital Partnership, through which he invested in several companies, including Yammer and Slack. The Social+Capital Partnership changed its name to Social Capital in 2015. He is a co-host of the technology podcast All In, alongside David Sacks, Jason Calacanis & David Friedberg.
Neil Rimer is a Swiss-Canadian venture capitalist who is the founding partner at Index Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in Europe, the United States, and Israel. He is also the co-chair of the board of directors at Human Rights Watch.
Gagan Biyani is an American of Indian descent serial entrepreneur, marketer, and journalist. He was a co-founder of Udemy, an online education company, and was co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company.
Social Capital, formerly known as Social+Capital Partnership, is a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. The firm specializes in technology startups, providing seed funding, venture capital, and private equity.
Metromile, Inc. is a San Francisco-based technology startup that offers pay-per-mile car insurance, licenses a digital insurance platform to insurance companies around the world, and provides a digitally native offering featuring smart driving features, automated claims, and vehicle information. In July 2022, Lemonade, Inc. acquired the company.
Lemonade, Inc., is an American insurance company. The company offers renters' insurance, homeowners' insurance, car insurance, pet insurance, and term life insurance in the United States, as well as contents and liability policies in Germany and the Netherlands and renters' insurance in France. The company is based in New York City and has approximately 1.9 million customers. Lemonade uses artificial intelligence and chatbots to process claims.
Clover Health Investments, Corp is an American health care company founded in 2014. The company provides Medicare Advantage (MA) insurance plans and operates as a direct contracting entity with the U.S. government. The company manages care for Medicare beneficiaries in 11 states and started trading publicly on January 8, 2021.