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A few weeks ago in San Francisco we had Charles River Ventures General Partner George Zachary. He candidly opens up about starting his career at Apple, going on to lead the development of the N64 at Silicon Graphics, and eventually to becoming a Venture Capitalist. George quotes a stat that he has invested about $150MM with returns over $1B in companies like Yammer, Millennial Media, Shutterfly (where he was also a founder), and many others. He talks about meeting and building relationships with guys like Elon Musk, David Sacks (Yammer), and Jack Dorsey, and well as benchmarks he sees across all great entrepreneurs. He also talks about following your gut and founders that are driven by their intuition. Lots of great insights.
For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. Bevy has raised $60M from Accel, Upfront Ventures, and others. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 20,000 events. In 2010 he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto CA with his wife and four children.
