Dave McClure has been a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor for over 25 years. He has invested in hundreds of startups all over the world and has twice been named to Forbes’ Midas List of the top 100 VCs in the world (2016 and 2017).

Prior to founding Practical Venture Capital in 2019, he was the founding GP of 500 Startups, a global VC firm with $1B AUM that has invested in over 2,500 companies and 5,000 founders across 75 countries. Investments include 30+ unicorns and 8 IPOs: Credit Karma (acq INTU $7B), Twilio (IPO 2016), SendGrid (IPO 2017), The RealReal (IPO 2019), Life360 (IPO 2019), Grab, Intercom, Ipsy, Canva, Udemy, Lucid, Flywire, FabFitFun, Talkdesk, GitLab, Algolia, PlanGrid (acq ADSK $875M), Vungle (acq Blackstone $750M). Dave created 20 VC funds under the 500 brand and invested in 20 other VC funds around the world.

Dave began his venture career as a fund manager at Founders Fund where he made seed-stage investments in 40 companies, resulting in 4 unicorns / 3 IPOs (TWLO, SEND, LYFT, Credit Karma) and 2 other 9-figure exits (Wildfire, Life360). Notably, he led the Credit Karma seed round in 2009 (acq INTU, >400X return). His $3M portfolio returned >$200M (~70X) in under 10 years.

Earlier in his career, Dave joined PayPal in 2001 as Director of Marketing. He was the founder/CEO of Aslan Computing, which was acquired by Servinet in 1998. He has a BS in Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University.