Welcome Christine and Kent

While First Round Capital has investments located all over the United States, our portfolio (and dealflow) is heavily concentrated on the west coast.  That’s why we opened a West Coast office two years ago, with the addition of my partner Rob Hayes and later Mazen Araabi to our team.  It’s why I’m going to qualify for Chairman’s Preferred on US Airways after my three trips to California this month.  And it’s also why I’m super-excited to announce the addition of two Principals in our San Francisco office – Christine Herron and Kent Goldman. 

I first met Christine while she was part of the investment team at the Omidyar Network, where we had several overlapping deals.  And this past year, Christine began working with us part time as a Venture Advisor, helping us out with a number of our new investments.  Her prior experience includes a number of entrepreneurial ventures in various capacities (including CEO).  And she started her career in venture capital at Geocapital Partners where she discovered a little company called Netcom before most people knew how to spell “internet.”

Kent’s journey to First Round Capital is a unique one – we truly were brought together by the "news feed”.  While I’ve known Kent for some time, we got to know each other much better this year when he was (unintentionally) ensnared in my ill-fated experiment with Facebook’s Social Advertising.  And, in an ironic twist you couldn’t script if you wanted too, the news of Kent’s new role at First Round Capital was also unintentionally revealed by Facebook’s pesky news feeds, as Kent blogged about earlier today.  Kent joins us from Yahoo, where he was a member of their Corporate Development team focusing on M&A to support the company's user-facing properties.  He also led business strategy efforts for Yahoo’s Front Page, Communications and Community products which included Yahoo.com, My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail.  Before Yahoo, Kent spent some time in investment banking and early-stage venture investing.

My partners and I are thrilled to welcome Christine and Kent to the team