Dave McClure is an entrepreneur and prominent angel investor

Angel investor

An angel investor or angel is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity...

 based in the San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

, who founded and runs the business incubator

Business incubator

Business incubators are programs designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services, developed and orchestrated by incubator management and offered both in the incubator and through its network of contacts...

 "500 Startups". He is often described as one of the super angel

Super angel

Super angel investor is a term sometimes used to describe a group of serial investors in early stage ventures who are perceived to be particularly sophisticated, insightful, or well-connected in the startup business community, particularly with respect to technology companies in Silicon Valley,...

 investors.

Bio

McClure was born in and grew up in West Virginia

West Virginia

West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...

. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science in "Mathematical Sciences Engineering".

Technology startups

McClure founded Aslan Computing, a technology consultancy, in 1994, and later sold the company to Servinet/Panurgy in 1998. He later worked as a technology consultant to Microsoft, Intel, and other companies. He was Director of Marketing at PayPal

PayPal

PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....

 from 2001 through 2004. He founded and ran marketing for Simply Hired

Simply Hired

Simply Hired is a employment website for job listings and online recruitment advertising network. The company aggregates job listings from thousands of sites across the Web including job boards, newspaper and classified listings, associations, social networks, content sites and company career sites...

 in 2005 and 2006.

After leaving PayPal, McClure became a frequent investor in consumer Internet startup companies. He led the fbFund incubator on behalf of Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

.

McClure gained attention both for his opinionated blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

 500 Hats (as of 2011 one of the ten most-read blogs on venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 finance), and as one of the so-called "Super Angel" investors involved in the Angelgate

Angelgate

Angelgate is a controversy surrounding allegations of price fixing and collusion among a group of ten angel investors in the San Francisco Bay Area.-The issue:...

 controversy.

500 Startups

500 Startups is a business accelerator and related investment fund McClure founded in 2010. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California

Mountain View, California

-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...

 in February, 2011. They expanded to a second class of 21 in June 2011, bringing the total number of investments to 140, including investments in myGengo

Mygengo

myGengo is a Tokyo-based web application company specializing in translation services. It was founded in December 2008 by Robert Laing and Matthew Romaine . myGengo’s human translation platform uses crowdsourcing to source a worldwide pool of freelance translators. The company offers three...

 and Udemy

Udemy

Udemy is an online learning platform that allows instructors to host courses. The site was launched by Eren Bali and Gagan Biyani in 2010.-History:...

.

External links

• 500hats - investment blog
• 500 Startups - official site for incubator