Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner

Santo Politi is a Founder & General Partner of Spark Capital. Santo has led Spark's investments in Adapt.tv (Acquired by AOL), Oculus VR (Acquired by Facebook), Admeld (acquired by NASDAQ:GOOG), CNET (acquired by NYSE:CBS), Genie, IPWireless (acquired by NYSE:GD), KickApps (acquired by NASDAQ: KITD), OneRiot (acquired by NYSE:WMT), Tashtego and Triggit. He has also participated in Spark's investments in thePlatform (acquired by NASDAQ:CMCSA) and 5Min (acquired by NASDAQ:AOL) as a board member.

Santo most recently was a Partner at Charles River Ventures (CRV) with an investment focus on media and entertainment infrastructure. His investments at CRV include BigBand Networks (NASDAQ:BBND), Broadbus Technologies (acquired by NYSE:MOT) and Groove Mobile (acquired by NASDAQ:LVWR).

Prior to joining CRV in early 2001, Santo served as President of New Media for Blockbuster Entertainment (NYSE:BBI), where he was responsible for establishing a new operating division focused on extending the company beyond its brick-and-mortar retail stores into digital broadcast and video on demand.

Before his work at Blockbuster, Santo co-founded BT Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm affiliated with Bankers Trust. Some of his successful investments at BT Venture Partners include Aether Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:AETH), Novatel Wireless, Inc. (NASDAQ: NVTL) and DigitalThink (NASDAQ:DTHK).

Santo has held various engineering and management positions with the Video Systems Division of Matsushita Electric Industrial in Osaka, Japan; Panasonic Broadcast and Television Systems Company; and Weston Instruments, a subsidiary of Schlumberger Industries.

Santo is the recipient of an Emmy Excellence in Technology Award. He has also been named multiple times to the Forbes Midas List, which ranks top venture capitalists who have created the most wealth for their investors.

Santo Politi holds an MBA in finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

An MS in Electrical Engineering from NJIT.

BS in Electrical Engineering & a BS in Physics from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey.

He is fluent in Japanese, conversational in Spanish and French and is a native Turkish speaker.