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 territori ...

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 t ...

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 ha ...

, and

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

. 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 k ...

, 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), pa ...

. 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, a fixed price 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 ...

Early life

Kopelman grew up in Great Neck, New York, 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 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 ...

at the

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

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 min ...

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 Symantec may refer to: *An American consumer software company now known as Gen Digital Inc. *A brand of enterprise security software purchased by Broadcom Inc. Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier ...

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 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 consist ...

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, p ...

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 Aster Data Systems was a data management and analysis software company headquartered in San Carlos, California. It was founded in 2005 and acquired by Teradata in 2011. History Aster Data was co-founded in 2005 by Stanford University graduate s ...

, Knewton, Gigya, 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 Dro ...

, Like.com, IronPort, Mint.com, 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, Warby Parker, Ring.com, Numerai, OpenX, LiveOps,

Boxed.com Boxed, Inc. is an American online and mobile membership-free wholesale retailer that offers direct delivery of bulk-sized packages via the Boxed app or the website. Boxed product offering has been compared to that of Costco. It is based in New Yor ...

, 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 Great Neck, New York. 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 Penns ...

. 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. Since ...

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