Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Josh Kopelman has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the Internet industry since its commercialization. In 1992, while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – and took it public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1996. Josh founded Half.com in July of 1999, and led it to become one of the largest sellers of used books, movies and music in the world. Half.com was acquired by eBay in July 2000 – and Josh remained with eBay for three years, running the Half.com business unit and growing eBay’s Media marketplace to almost half a billion dollars in annual gross merchandise sales. In late 2003 Josh helped to found TurnTide, an anti-spam company that created the world's first anti-spam router. TurnTide was acquired by Symantec just six months later.

Josh co-founded First Round Capital in 2004 to reinvent seed-stage investing. Since that time, the firm has invested in over 300 emerging technology startups – becoming one of the most active venture capital firms in the country. For the last five years, Josh has consistently ranked in the top 20 on the Forbes “Midas List” which ranks the top 100 tech investors, earning the number four spot in 2014. Josh has been named one of the top ten ‘angel investors’ in the United States by Newsweek magazine, one of "Tech's New Kingmakers" by Business 2.0 magazine and a "Rising VC Star" by Fortune magazine. Josh is also the proud winner of a second place ribbon in the 2011 Nantucket Watermelon Eating competition.
Josh is an inventor on 13 U.S. Patents for his work in Internet technology. In June 2000, he was awarded Ernst and Young’s prestigious “Entrepreneur of the Year” award for the Greater Philadelphia region.
Josh earned a Bachelor of Science degree cum laude in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.