Dave McClure

Dave McClure
Dave McClure, August 2007
Born	1966/1967 (age 49–50) West Virginia, United States
Education	Johns Hopkins University
Occupation	Entrepreneur, angel investor

Dave McClure is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who founded and runs the business accelerator 500 Startups. He is often described as one of the super angel investors.

McClure was born in and grew up in West Virginia. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematical Sciences Engineering.

McClure founded Aslan Computing, a technology consultancy, in 1994, and later sold the company to Servinet/Panurgy in 1998. He subsequently worked as a technology consultant to Microsoft, Intel, and other high-tech companies. He was Director of Marketing at PayPal from 2001 through 2004. He launched and ran marketing for Simply Hired in 2005 and 2006.

After leaving PayPal, McClure became a frequent investor in consumer Internet startup companies, investing in and advising more than 15 consumer internet startups, including virtual goods monetization and payments platform Jambool (acquired by Google in 2010) and US online education directory TeachStreet (acquired by Amazon in 2011). During the summer of 2009, McClure was acting investment director for Facebook fbFund (a joint venture incubator/accelerator with prominent venture capital firms Founders Fund and Accel Partners), which provided early-stage capital to startups developing applications using Facebook Platform & Facebook Connect.

McClure gained attention both for his opinionated blog 500 Hats (as of 2011 one of the ten most-read blogs on venture capital finance), and as one of the so-called "Super Angel" investors involved in the Angelgate controversy.

500 Startups is a seed accelerator and related investment fund McClure founded in 2010. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its office in Mountain View, California in January, 2011. They expanded to a second class of 21 in June 2011 and a third class of 34 in October 2011.