Startup aficionado Dave McClure has formally joined VC firm the Founders Fund as an angel investor, according to an update he made to his LinkedIn profile this week. The Founders Fund was created by former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel in 2005 and is described by author Sarah Lacy as having an ethos "rooted in giving founders better terms and getting out of their way."
Founders Fund has invested in some of the most high profile startups in the market, including Facebook and Slide.com.
McClure started and managed the PayPal Developer Network from 2001 to 2004 and has been an advisor, consultant and angel investor to a wide variety of startups ever since. He's well known for offering good advice on company interaction with developer communities.
McClure is the first member of Founders Fund to describe his position there on LinkedIn as an Angel. A number of other tech funds have moved into offering small funding rounds, but bringing a well known angel investor in to do angel investing in-house is smart. The Fund will get McClure's access to engineers and technical smarts and he'll get access to some of the pitches they see and presumably be paid from their fund maintenance fees. It's a blockbuster deal in the scene that funds small startups.
See also our series on ReadWriteWeb called The A Team, where we cover early funding news in a down economy.
Photo CC by Joi Ito.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/9481
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Jobwire posts
Congrats Dave!
Posted by: Steve Poland | December 17, 2008 2:35 PM
Good coverage Marshall of a true industry leader,
Dave is a natural leader, community advocate and has a nose to find what's happening in the industry, and finding the right developers and startups that are going to make it happen.
As an industry analyst covering this space, I lean on Dave for his 'ear on the ground' intuition and read his blog for perspective --and for the pretty colors.
Congrats Dave, well deserved, now that you're an angel, you could perform on a lyre at my next tweetup, kthxbye
Posted by: Jeremiah Owyang | December 17, 2008 2:56 PM
Great to hear Dave!
Posted by: Nick Gonzalez | December 17, 2008 4:01 PM
Sad that Dave won't be starting his own fund, but delighted that he's joining Founders Fund. They're really innovating and shaking up the world of VC.
Congrats Dave!
Posted by: Chris Yeh | December 17, 2008 4:51 PM
Now that's it official, congratulations!
Looking forward to hearing more about your coming deals :-)
As a coincidence, Cmune has just been selected as "Startup of the Day" by Microsoft in their BizSpark Program ^_^
For more info: http://www.cmune.com/Blog/post/We-join-the-Microsoft-BizSpark-Startup-program.aspx
Posted by: Benjamin Joffe | December 17, 2008 5:05 PM
Congrats Dave!
Posted by: Dave Ambrose | December 17, 2008 5:31 PM
congrats to Dave & Founders Fund! He will be a huge asset to the fund
Posted by: Ryan Born | December 18, 2008 3:03 PM
Very useful news! Thank you!
Posted by: Ben Fremer | December 18, 2008 8:23 PM