Company Info

True Ventures is the premiere early stage venture capital firm. True's founders and partners include Phil Black, John Burke, Jon Callaghan, Puneet Agarwal, and company leaders that include Om Malik of GigaOm, Toni Schneider of WordPress, and Tony Conrad of About.me. True invests in the best people who are creating companies in proven high growth sectors of the high tech industry, and provides a trusted, seasoned partner and facilitate a powerful community to help foster growth and innovation.

Phil is a founder of True Ventures with expertise in early stage investing and multiple investments in disrputive customer service. He worked for many years learning the venture trade while at Summit Partners and at the predecessor firm to Lightspeed Venture Partners. He spent the crazy “internet bubble” years at ABS Ventures working with John Burke, and, in 2003, they co-founded a small angel fund, Blacksmith Capital, which set him on the path of pursuing the earliest stage technology companies that wished to raise modest, initial rounds of capital. Blacksmith proved what True Ventures has been able to institutionalize: great founders of early stage technology companies can and often prefer to start their businesses and get a lot of traction with $2.5 million or less of initial capitalization. The experience and discipline that Phil honed at Blacksmith is a critical asset to True, along with his unending passion and excitement for the early stage technology community. Phil holds an AB degree in Economics from Stanford University.

Esther Dyson is a director of the Sunlight Foundation and an coaches Directly on community and tranparency initiatiatives. She is an active angel investor in a variety of start-ups, for-profit and otherwise, around the world. Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include 23andMe, Boxbe,Eventful, Evernote, Meetup, Yandex (Russia) and WPP Group. Some of her other investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (Symantec), Orbitz (Cendant), Medstory and Powerset (Microsoft), Plazes (Nokia), Tacit (Oracle), Linkstorm, Mashery, Organized Wisdom, Ovusoft, PatientsLikeMe, Resilient,Technorati, ThingD, Vizu.com and Zedo. She is also active in the commercial space world, with investments in Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures/Zero-G, XCOR Aerospace and Zero-G. For more than 20 years Dyson wrote the newsletter Release 1.0 and ran PC Forum, the IT market's leading executive conference. Dyson was the founding chairman of ICANN from 1998-2000, and was also chairman of the EFF in the 90s. In both her investments and her nonprofit activities, she has always been concerned with the impact of information (technology) on business and society.

Samer is the founding CEO of Vault.com and focuses on helping Directly develop a strong expert community. He joined Lightspeed in January, 2010 as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Prior to that, Samer Hamadeh was co-founder and CEO of Vault.com, the most trusted name in career information, which was sold in October, 2007 to Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a New York-based media-and-communications private-equity firm. During the summer of 2010, Samer founded Zeel.com, a free online service for finding and booking appointments with top health & wellness practitioners. Samer sits on the board of the non-profit PeaceWorks Foundation and is a board observer, angel investor, and/or advisor in two dozen early-stage companies, including GrubHub, SalesCrunch, Directly.com, Splurgy, and PublicStuff. Samer is also a mentor at several accelerators, including Blueprint Health, NYCSeedStart, and First Growth Venture Network as well as a member of Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and the Georgetown McDonough School's Entrepreneurship Advisory Board. A David Rockefeller Fellow, Samer holds a BS in chemistry and an MS in chemical engineering from Stanford University.

Karl Jacob founded Keen/Ingenio and collaborates with Directly on pay-per-use customer service models.  He is a four-time entrepreneur and has been building and advising companies for the last 14 years. In his career, Jacob raised over $200 million from prestigious investors like Integral Partners, Norwest Ventures, Bay Partners, Benchmark Capital, Ignition Partners and others. One of his companies, Dimension X, was acquired by Microsoft in 1997; and another, Ingenio, was acquired by AT&T in 2007. He has received numerous awards, including being named one of BusinessWeek's top ten up-and-comers. Jacob is currently the Chairman of Coveroo. Previously, he took Cloudmark from no revenue and $50,000 in investment to $16 million in investment and millions in revenue. Prior to this, Jacob joined Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Jacob has advised and been a board member at several companies including Facebook, Dimension X, Keen, and Cloudmark. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Southern California, where he sits on the school's board of counselors for the School of Engineering.

Gil Penchina is the former VP of Business Development of eBay and helps Directly establish new markets and drive liquidity across the marketplace. He is an active angel investor with 50+ investments in companies that include LinkedIn, Wikia, Paypal, Tinfoil Security, Become.com, Findwhat, Evite, Betzip, Qype, Bounty, He serves as an Advisor of Reify Software, Inc., HealthTap, Inc. and Plusmo, Inc. Mr. Penchina served as Chief Executive Officer of Wikia, Inc., from June 2006 to October 2011. Mr. Penchina joined Wikia from eBay, where he served in a number of executive positions, including a Regional Vice President of Europe and Asia and as a General Manager in the US. He served as an Executive at eBay for 8 years. He also worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. He serves as a Member of Advisory Board at BigDeal.com, Inc. He is a serial entrepreneur. Mr. Penchina holds a BS in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business.

Brian Witlin is an EIR at IDEO and focused on developing the Directly brand and positioning. He is a serial entrepreneur who is the CEO and Founder of ShopWell, the first truly personalized nutrition resource. He also holds EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) positions at IDEO and StartX, a Lecturer position at Stanford University's Hasso Platner Institute of Design, and serves as a startup mentor for 500 Startups seed venture fund, Directly, DiamondMMA, and IDEO's Entrepreneurship Initiative. Previously, Brian co-founded Golaces, LLC, a product company acquired by a publicly traded footwear company and also co-founded LeverWorks, a software development consultancy acquired by LEO Media (now Quasar Strategies). Brian holds a M.S. in Engineering and Design from Stanford University and a B.S. in Business and Economics from Lehigh University. Brian is a classically trained artist/draftsman, an aspiring mixed martial artist, and has a love for his hometown Chicago-style hotdogs and deep-dish pizza.