David Teten is a Partner with Orange Collective, a fund backed by 150+ Y Combinator alumni investing in the next generation of Y Combinator founders. He is cofounder and Chair of Action Tank, which uses AI to empower advocacy groups and other nonprofits to better accomplish their mission. David is also Chair of AltsTech, a community of investors in alternatives using AI, technology and analytics to generate alpha, and Founders’ Next Move, for tech founders exploring new ideas.

He was formerly a Partner with Coolwater Capital, which invests in emerging fund managers as a limited partner, into general partnerships, and into fund management companies. Coolwater runs an accelerator for emerging VC fund managers, which has graduated >300 VCs which have raised >$5B collectively. David was previously Managing Partner with HOF Capital and a Partner with ff Venture Capital. Both HOF and ffVC grew both AUM and their LP base >10x during his tenure, based on strong returns. HOF Capital now manages over $4b AUM with LPs from 37 countries.

David has advised such institutional investors as Birch Hill Equity Partners, Goldman Sachs Special Situations Group, Icahn Enterprises, LLR Partners, Real Ventures, Right Side Capital, Tiferes.vc, Transform Investment Group, and Orascom TMT Investments (Sawiris family office). David has served on the boards of Ionic (sold to Twilio), Authorea (sold to Wiley), Earnest Analytics (Observer, sold to Consumer Edge), Signup.com, and Whisk (sold to Deem).

David is Founder of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York, now the largest angel group on the East Coast. He was previously a Managing Director with Evalueserve, a 2,500-person global research and analytics company, and Founder and CEO of Circle of Experts, an investment research firm acquired by Evalueserve. He worked with Bear Stearns’ Investment Banking division in their technology/defense mergers and acquisitions team, and was a strategy consultant with mars & co in Brazil, Chile and the US. He also founded an outsourced software engineering/IT services group, which he grew to 35 clients, and was CEO of an Israeli investment bank which he grew to 450+ clients. David holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA, both with honors.

David has contributed original research on investing topics to Harvard Businesss Review, PE Hub, Institutional Investor, Techcrunch, and VentureBeat. He’s also the co-author of To University and Beyond: Launch Your Career in High Gear and The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.

David grew up in Marin County, Northern California, and learned to program on an Atari 800. He trains in parkour and bodyweight exercises. He speaks passable French and Hebrew but has completely lost the Portuguese he learned while working in Brazil.

Investment Theses

I am particularly interested in three sectors:

• AI. No surprise there.
• Investment technology. Investment management offers unusually high margins and unusually dissatisfied clients; that’s a recipe for VCs to turn analog dollars into digital dimes. See Asset Managers, Prepare to Have Your Business Disrupted and Venture capitalists eating our own dog food: Using technology and analytics to make better investments.
  
• Salestech. Sales today is still one of the most manual, inefficient processes in business. See How to Make Sales as Easy as Online Dating. People are much faster to use new technology in the search for romance than they are in business, which means you can see the future of business relationships by analyzing online dating.

Macro themes

• Human knowledge compounds; we build new things on the shoulders of giants at a faster and faster pace. See the Law of Accelerating Returns: the rate of change of progress keeps accelerating, because humans can use the technology at their disposal to progress faster than previous generations could without the technology
• A wider array of high-potential people are becoming founders, because of lack of traditional job opportunities; far better education around founding companies; the no-code movement; and AI.

VC firm management

• If private market investors eat their own dog food, and use technology and analytics in their investment process, they’ll get better results.  In the liquid markets, firms like DE Shaw and Two Sigma have rethought investing by using technology and data to inform their decision-making. In the private markets, few investors are yet doing this. I cannot promise limited partners performance alpha, but I have excellent odds of delivering process alpha. See AltsTech.
• If you invest in diverse women and founders from non-traditional backgrounds, you will get better returns. An investors’ job is to invest in what others overlook. I’ve launched numerous initiatives to build bridges with communities others overlook.
• Alternative VC (e.g., Revenue-based Finance) is a better fit than traditional equity venture capital for many early-stage companies.