Josh Kopelman

Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist.

Kopelman is best known as the founder of Half.com, a fixed price marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of used books, movies and music products. In 2000, Kopelman sold Half.com to EBay for US $350 million.

Biography

Kopelman was born in Great Neck, New York. He attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992, during his sophomore year, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – an Internet information company. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Kopelman left Infonautics in 1999 to found Half.com.

After selling Half.com to eBay, Kopelman remained with eBay for three years. In early 2004 Josh co-founded TurnTide, an anti-spam company that acquired and marketed the world's first anti-spam router from ePrivacy Group. TurnTide was acquired by Symantec just six months later.

In 2001 Josh and his wife created the Kopelman Foundation [http://www.kopelman.org] , a non-profit organization focused on angel philanthropy to provide “start-up” grants to social entrepreneurs. In 2002 the Kopelman Foundation funded a project to digitize and host the complete text of the Jewish Encyclopedia online.

Current Work

Kopelman is currently Managing Director of First Round Capital [http://www.firstround.com] , a seed-stage venture fund. He is an investor, director and advisor to a variety of businesses, most in the software and Internet domain, including Jingle Networks, StumbleUpon, Odeo, LinkedIn, Eventful, Yapta, Krugle, Ambient Devices, del.icio.us, IronPort, Ugobe, RockYou!, myYearbook, VideoEgg and Wikia and several other firms.

While Kopelman has invested in a large number of Web 2.0 companies, Kopelman warned that too many Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are targeting an audience of 53,651 [http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html] people, the number of then-current subscribers to TechCrunch, a popular weblog that covers the internet industry. In 2007, Kopelman helped to coin the phrase the Implicit Web to better describe the Semantic Web.

Kopelman currently lives in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

References

External links

* [http://redeye.firstround.com Redeye VC - Josh Kopelman's Blog]
* [http://www.linkedin.com/in/jkopelman Josh Kopelman's] public profile with his positions and investments
* [http://www.firstround.com First Round Capital]
* [http://www.firstround.com/our_team.html#KOPELMAN First Round Capital management page] including a brief biography of Kopelman
* [http://www.kopelman.org The Kopelman Foundation]
* [http://www.midascapital.com/ Midas Capital] Kopelman's private investment fund, which preceded First Round Capital