Nurturing Disruption: A New Way to Fund the Great American Startup
Harj Taggar, Partner, Y Combinator
Chris Sacca, Founder & Principal, Lowercase Capital
in conversation with Steven Levy, Senior Writer, WIRED
Bio
Steven Levy
Steven Levy has been covering the digital revolution for more than 25 years. Before joining WIRED in 2008, he was chief technology correspondent at Newsweek. He is the author of seven books, most recently the New York Times best seller In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Other books include Insanely Great, on the history of Apple's Macintosh computer, and Hackers, which was named the best tech book of the PC era by PC Magazine.
Christopher Sacca
An accomplished venture investor, private equity principal, company advisor, entrepreneur, and public speaker, Chris manages a portfolio of over two dozen consumer web, mobile, and wireless technology start-ups as well as an array of mature enterprises through his holding company, Lowercase Capital. Among his representative investments is Twitter Inc., where Chris was one of the first investors and works with the company every week as a strategic advisor.
Previously, Chris served as Head of Special Initiatives at Google Inc. In that role, among other responsibilities, he founded and headed up the alternative access and wireless divisions. His most visible projects include Google's 700MHz and TV white spaces spectrum initiatives, the company's groundbreaking data center in Oregon and Google's free citywide WiFi network in Mountain View, CA. Chris also spearheaded many of Google's business development and M&A transactions and was on the founding team of the company's New Business Development organization.
The Wall Street Journal cited Sacca as "possibly the most influential businessman in America" and he was also recently recognized as a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, annually selecting 20 of the world's most promising leaders and public servants under the age of 45. In addition, Chris serves as an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University. Chris regularly appears on television, radio, and in print and has been featured in Business Week, Fortune, Fast Company, and on CNBC, BBC, CNN, FOX, and NPR as an expert in the realms of entrepreneurism, venture capital, and disruptive technologies.
In parallel with his frequent keynotes at technology industry events, Chris is perennially hired by many of the world's largest companies, financial institutions, universities, and even some governments to speak about innovation, workplace design, and business strategy in a digital era. Back home, Chris is a fixture in the Silicon Valley startup community, and his reputation for fruitful and fun collaborations with early stage companies earned him a 2009 TechCrunch Crunchie Award nomination for Best Angel Investor and he was named as one of the top 10 angel investors in the country by Business Week.
Chris graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center where he was a member of The Tax Lawyer law review and was honored as the school's Philip A. Ryan and Ralph J. Gilbert Memorial Scholar. He also graduated cum laude from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and was an Edmund Evans Memorial Scholar as well as a Weeks Family Foundation Scholar. During his studies, Chris attended university at each of Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Quito, Ecuador, University College Cork, in Cork, Ireland, and the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain.
Long before that, beginning in 6th grade, Chris attended the State University of New York at Buffalo for six years of graduate-level mathematics classes wearing thick glasses, awkward braces, and knowing the entire time that technology and computers would be passions of his for life.
Harj Taggar
Harj Taggar was previously founder of Auctomatic, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2007 and was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008. He graduated in 2006 from Oxford, where he studied law.
Industrial region, west-central California. Roughly bounded by San Francisco Bay on the north, the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west, and the Diablo Range on the east, it takes its (unofficial) name from the extensive use of silicon in the region's electronics industries. The U.S. government invested heavily in the region's industry following World War II. A second economic surge occurred with the proliferation of personal computers in the 1980s, and a third surge followed the growth of the Internet in the 1990s.
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