FORA.tv Speaker - 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.