About - Meet the Geeks

Geeks on a Plane is organized by Web2Asia (@web2asia), a business accelerator for foreign and local Internet, mobile and eCommerce companies in China, Japan and South Korea, in cooperation with Founders Fund and Dave McClure. Please contact us at info@web2asia.com for any questions.

Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, & internet marketing nerd.  Dave currently runs a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund.  His passion is helping startups with marketing, product strategy, and startup metrics, and he is an advisor or investor for several companies including: Canopy Financial, Eventvue, KissMetrics, Mashery, Mint, RichRelevance, 750 Industries, Simply Hired, SlideShare, TeachStreet, Twilio.

Dave is the founder of Startup2Startup, a monthly dinner series for Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs & investors.  He has been a conference organizer for many tech & startup events including STARTonomics, Graphing Social Patterns, and Web 2.0 Expo (SF).  He has been a guest lecturer on social network platforms & applications at Stanford University.  Dave is a board member for microfinance accelerator Unitus, advisor to microfinance lender Kiva.org, and co-founder of the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network.

Previously Dave launched & ran marketing for job search engine Simply Hired, and its evil twin SimplyFired.com.  From 2001 to 2004, Dave worked at PayPal (acquired by eBay in 2002) as Director of Marketing, where he started the PayPal Developer Network program. Prior to PayPal, Dave was a database consultant & programmer for several companies, including Microsoft and Intel. In 1994 he founded Aslan Computing, an internet & e-commerce consulting group later acquired by Servinet / Panurgy in 1998.

Before coming to Silicon Valley, Dave barely graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a BS Engineering in Mathematical Sciences and a minor in frisbee, billiards, & foosball. His interests include microfinance and economic innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital, ultimate frisbee, cartoons and animation, and an ever-growing collection of funny-looking hats.

For more info on Dave visit his LinkedIn profile & his blog: Master of 500 Hats.

The Founders Fund is a San Francisco, California venture capital firm that has led several early stage funding rounds for well known Web 2.0 start-up companies.

The firm was organized by Managing Partners Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery in early 2005, and raised its first fund of $50 million from individual entrepreneurs and angel investors in July of that year. In 2006, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and Facebook, joined as managing partner. In 2007 the firm raised a new fund of $220 million.

The firm is made up of the following Partners:

• Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO and Chairman of PayPal

• Ken Howery, founder and former CFO of PayPal
• Luke Nosek, founder and former Vice President of PayPal
• Sean Parker, founder and former CEO of Napster as well as President of Plaxo and Facebook

The Founders Fund has made investments in 23 companies as of December, 2007. Among them are Engage.com, Facebook.com, Geni.com, IronPort, jaxtr, koders, Ooma, Powerset.com, Quantcast, Rapleaf, slide.com, and SmartDrive Systems.

Web2Asia (@web2asia) is a market entry partner for Western Internet, Web 2.0, online gaming & eCommerce companies in China, Japan and Korea. The company thereby aims to act not merely as a consultant for entry strategies or a software development outsourcing company but as a complete partner to successfully launch and scale Internet or mobile applications business for its customers.

Additionally Web2Asia incubates local East Asian start ups and entrepreneurs through their business acceleration programme.

Apart from its core business Web2Asia is engaged in many supporting activities such as organizing the monthly Shanghai Lunch 2.0,  co-organizing tour such as the Geeks on a Plane Tour or the China 2.0 Blogger Tour, or co-organizing of the annual Open Web Asia Conference.

Responsible for organizing the Geeks on a Plane Tour is Web2Asia co-founder George Godula - please feel free to drop him a line at george@web2asia.com for questions.

Web2Asia

Room 2022-2026
No. 1438 Shaanxi Road (North),
corner of Changshou Road
Shanghai 200060, China

phone: +86 21 32270872
fax: +86 21 32270875

web: http://www.web2asia.com

email: info@web2asia.com