Josh Kopelman was a serial entrepreneur before he was ever a venture capitalist - he co-founded Infonautics as a Wharton undergraduate in 1992 and took it public just four years later, then founded Half.com in 1999, selling it to eBay within a year. After a brief detour co-founding an anti-spam startup that Symantec acquired within six months, Kopelman co-founded First Round Capital in 2004 with Howard Morgan, built specifically to reinvent seed-stage investing with small initial checks to companies with little more than a founding team and an idea. First Round's most famous bet came in 2010, when Kopelman led the firm's roughly $1.25 million investment in a tiny startup called UberCab - the company's first-ever institutional funding, made when Uber was still working out of a First Round conference room. That seed investment became one of the highest-multiple returns in venture history when Uber went public in 2019 at a valuation exceeding $70 billion.
Education
B.S. cum laude, Entrepreneurial Management & Marketing, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Previous Experience
Co-Founder, Infonautics Corporation (1992) - IPO'd on NASDAQ in 1996
Founder, Half.com (1999) - acquired by eBay in 2000
Co-Founder, TurnTide (2003) - anti-spam startup acquired by Symantec six months later