“When people ask me what I think about their business idea I say, ‘It doesn’t matter what I think. What do your customers think?'”
As part of a continuing series of interviews with various entrepreneurs at the tops of their industries, I sat down with 500 Startups Founder, Dave McClure, to talk about what else, money and diversity in Silicon Valley.
Dave McClure is a venture capitalist & founding partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. He likes to hang out with entrepreneurs, and occasionally invest in startups foolish enough to let him. He has been an investor in over 250 companies including Mint.com, Twilio, Wildfire Interactive, SendGrid, TaskRabbit, SlideShare, Mashery, CreditKarma, KISSmetrics, and MakerBot, among others.
Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twilio, Mint.com, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft. Years ago he used to do real work like coding or marketing or running conferences, but these days he mostly does useless stuff like sending lots of email, blogging, and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.
He barely graduated from Johns Hopkins University and also likes to play ultimate frisbee when his knees don’t hurt.
Never one to hold back, Dave waxes poetic (not really) on:
- His own journey from Johns Hopkins engineering student to being one of the original PayPal employees to angel to juggernaut
- The lack of diversity in Silicon Valley
- His ‘Why’ for founding 500 Startups
- What companies need to do to position themselves for venture capital
- What he looks for in an investment
- Where’s he’s looking to invest next
- The BIGGEST mistakes startups make
- And most importantly…Why the hell he curses so much!!!!????!!!