Joshua Kopelman is an

America The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which hav ...

, and

philanthropist Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives, for the Public good (economics), public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private goo ...

. Kopelman is best known as a founder of

First Round Capital First Round is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best ...

, a pioneering seed-stage venture fund that led the seed round in

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), package ...

. Josh has consistently been ranked as one of the top 20 Venture Capitalists in the world. Before founding First Round, Josh was a founder of

Half.com Half.com was an e-commerce website and a subsidiary of eBay in which sellers offered items for sale at fixed prices. The items available on half.com were limited to books, textbooks, music, movies, video games, and video game consoles. Half prov ...

, a

fixed price A fixed price is a price set for a good or a service that is not subject to bargaining. The price may be fixed because the seller has set it, or because the price is regulated by the authorities under price controls. Bargaining is very commo ...

marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of used books, movies and music products. In 2000, Kopelman sold Half.com to

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

Early life

Kopelman grew up in

Great Neck, New York Great Neck is a region on Long Island, New York, that covers a peninsula on the North Shore (Long Island), North Shore and includes nine villages, among them Great Neck (village), New York, Great Neck, Great Neck Estates, New York, Great Neck Es ...

, the son of Carol and Dr. Richard Kopelman.New York Times: "Rena M. Cohen, Joshua Kopelman"
August 13, 1995 His father was a professor at

Baruch College Baruch College (officially the Bernard M. Baruch College) is a public college in New York City. It is a constituent college of the City University of New York system. Named for financier and statesman Bernard M. Baruch, the college operates und ...

and his mother a real estate broker. He attended the

Wharton School The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in P ...

at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

and graduated in 1993.

Career

TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 - Day 1 (26846434301) (cropped)

In 1992, during his sophomore year, Kopelman co-founded

Infonautics Infonautics was an information services company, founded in 1992 by Marvin Weinberger, Lawrence Husick, and Josh Kopelman, and had its headquarters in Wayne, Pennsylvania, United States. It was a spin-out from Telebase, Inc., which retained a mino ...

Corporation, in Wayne, Pennsylvania. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Kopelman left Infonautics in 1999 to found Half.com. After selling Half.com to eBay, Kopelman remained with eBay for three years. In 2004, Josh co-founded TurnTide an anti-spam technology company that was acquired by Symantec. Josh Kopelman

Josh is an inventor on sixteen U.S. Patents for his work in Internet technology. Josh was ranked 3rd on the 2018 New York Times list of Top Venture Capitalists and consistently ranks in the top 20 of the Forbes

Midas List The ''Forbes'' Midas list is the annual ranking by ''Forbes'' magazine of the most influential and best-performing venture capital investors. Described by Kara Swisher as the "Oscars for venture capitalists in tech," the Midas List uses parameter ...

of the top 100 tech investors (#18 in 2011, #6 in 2012, #12 in 2013, #11 in 2014, #4 in 2015, #6 in 2016, #35 in 2017, #19 in 2018, #39 in 2019, and #79 in 2020). Josh has been named as 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 also is the proud winner of a second place ribbon in the 2011 Nantucket Watermelon Eating competition. Kopelman is currently Managing Director of

, a seed-stage venture fund. He is an investor, director and advisor to a variety of businesses, most in the

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

and

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

domain, including

OnDeck Capital OnDeck Capital is an online small business lending company in the United States. It has offices in Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Denver, CO, and South Jordan, UT. History Entrepreneur Mitch Jacobs founded OnDeck in 2006 and headquartered the comp ...

, Flatiron Health, Aster Data Systems,

Knewton Knewton is an adaptive learning company that has developed a platform to personalize educational content as well as has developed courseware for higher education concentrated in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The ...

Gigya Gigya, Inc. is a technology company founded in Tel Aviv, Israel and headquartered in Mountain View, California with additional offices in New York, Tel Aviv, London, Paris, Hamburg, and Sydney. Offering Gigya offers a customer identity m ...

, AltSchool,

The Black Tux ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the ...

Five Below 5 is a number, numeral, and glyph. 5, five or number 5 may also refer to: * AD 5, the fifth year of the AD era * 5 BC, the fifth year before the AD era Literature * ''5'' (visual novel), a 2008 visual novel by Ram * ''5'' (comics), an awa ...

Massdrop Drop (formerly Massdrop) is an American e-commerce company based in San Francisco, California. Drop uses data and insights from community to develop and find products that feed their interests in audio products and mechanical keyboards. The Drop ...

, Like.com,

IronPort IronPort Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Bruno, California, was a company that designed and sold products and services that were intended to protect enterprises against internet threats. IronPort was founded in December 2000 by Scott Banist ...

Mint.com Mint, also known as Intuit Mint (styled in its logo as intuit mint with dotted 't' characters in "intuit" and undotted 'i' characters) and formerly known as Mint.com, is a personal financial management website and mobile app for the US and Canad ...

, Monetate,

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

, ModCloth,

AppNexus Xandr, formerly known as AppNexus, is an American multinational technology company operating a cloud-based software platform that enables and optimizes programmatic online advertising. Headquartered in the Flatiron District of New York City, the ...

, BankSimple, Swipely, True & Co.,

Wanelo Wanelo is an e-commerce company headquartered in San Francisco’s SoMa district. It was founded in 2012 by Deena Varshavskaya. History Deena Varshavskaya founded the company because she felt frustrated by shopping in physical malls and wanted ...

Warby Parker Warby Parker is an American online retailer of prescription glasses, contact lenses, and sunglasses, based in New York City. Warby Parker was founded as primarily online retailer, but now sells primarily (about 90%) through approximately 160 p ...

, Ring.com, Numerai, OpenX, LiveOps, Boxed.com, Clover Health, Upstart and

Discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...

. In 2007, Kopelman helped to coin the phrase the Implicit Web to better describe the Semantic Web.

Personal life

In 1995, Josh married Rena Cohen, an attorney, in

. In 2001, Josh and his wife created the Kopelman Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic organization to provide “start-up” grants to social entrepreneurs. In 2002, the Kopelman Foundation funded a project to digitize and host the complete text of the

Jewish Encyclopedia ''The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day'' is an English-language encyclopedia containing over 15,000 articles on th ...

online. In 2016, Josh was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of the

Philadelphia Inquirer ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The newspaper's circulation is the largest in both the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley metropolitan region of Southeastern Pennsy ...

. Kopelman currently lives in a suburb of

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

with his wife and two children.

References

External links

Redeye VC - Josh Kopelman's Blog
*
First Round Capital management page
including a brief biography of Kopelman
The Kopelman Foundation

Midas Capital
Kopelman's private investment fund, which preceded First Round Capital
Video interview with Josh Kopelman on the 10th anniversary of Half.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kopelman, Joshua Living people American computer businesspeople American Internet company founders American technology chief executives American venture capitalists Businesspeople from New York (state) EBay IronPort people Jewish American philanthropists People from Great Neck, New York Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania alumni Philanthropists from New York (state) Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American Jews