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David Tisch

David Tisch is an American venture capitalist known as the managing partner and founder of BoxGroup, a New York-based early-stage investment firm [1][3][16][5]. He founded BoxGroup after making his first angel investment, a $25,000 check into Boxie, a pre-streaming era Roku competitor whose founders had previously worked in big tech; the firm's name derives from that company as well as a New York City nightclub called Box [19]. Under his leadership BoxGroup grew into one of the most active early-stage investors on the East coast, describing itself as a generalist fund that has backed more than 450 companies across consumer internet, enterprise software, fintech, healthcare, and life sciences, typically making forty to fifty new investments a year with a small team [1][18]. Tisch has stated that BoxGroup's first fund invested in 152 companies, of which nineteen reached billion-dollar valuations, a batting average he has cited as evidence against the "spray and pray" model of seed investing [18].

Before founding BoxGroup, Tisch was the third employee at Techstars and started and ran its New York program from 2010 to 2012, incubating thirty-six companies before leaving to focus on BoxGroup full time [8][9][18]. He has also described earlier career experience at KGB, a large directory-assistance company under contract with major telecom carriers, where he was tasked with figuring out how to use the company's data, an experience he has credited with shaping many of his core professional lessons [18]. Tisch went on to co-found and serve as chairman of Spring Inc. from 2013 to 2018, and later became chairman of Good Dog beginning in 2018 [11][6]. He also served as a professor and head of the Startup Studio at Cornell Tech from 2014 to 2019, a role that grew out of his earlier skepticism, voiced to Cornell Tech's founding team, about whether academic institutions could meaningfully accelerate early-stage startup ecosystems [10][18].

Tisch holds a bachelor's degree in American history from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and has said his history background shaped his approach to investing by encouraging him to interpret the present, and future possibilities, through historical context [13][14][19]. He has recounted early exposure to computing and the internet, including teaching himself to use AOL chat rooms and later attempting to learn the Ruby programming language in order to interview prospective technical co-founders [18]. Among the investment decisions he has pointed to as formative is his early rejection of Mark Pincus's pitch for what became Zynga, which he has cited as a lesson in the greater cost of missing good companies as opposed to funding bad ones [18]. He also serves on the board of Friends of Hudson River Park [7].

Experience

  1. Managing Partner
    BoxGroup2007 to Present
  2. Chairman
    Good DogJan 2018 to Present
  3. Board Member
    Friends of Hudson River Park2017 to Present
  4. Co-Founder of TechStars NYC
    TechStars2010 to 2023
  5. Managing Director - NYC
    TechStars2010 to 2012
  6. Professor and Head of the Startup Studio
    Cornell Tech2014 to 2019
  7. Co-Founder and Chairman
    Spring Inc.2013 to Nov 2018
  8. Co-Founder and Managing Director
    knowmore2008 to 2009

Education

Media & appearances

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