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Anything
Anything is a no-code, text-to-app builder for non-technical users with a native GenAI approach.
First lessons in entrepreneurship
David’s pursuit of entrepreneurship started early. In high school, he noticed that the staff at his father’s law firm were handwriting labels for the magazines in their library. Seeing an opportunity, he went home and developed software on his PC to automate this process, creating pre-printed labels to streamline magazine circulation. This led David to found Data Route and started selling his software to other law and private libraries like Davis Polk and the Federal Reserve. The earnings from this endeavor allowed him to pay for college. But there were bumps along the way. Because he’d never run a software business before, he provided free upgrades and maintenance, and had to make repeated trips from college back to New York to provide customer service. After graduation, he sold Data Route to his friend Brad Feld, a fellow entrepreneur who went on to co-found Techstars and Foundry.
Securing the Internet
In 1995, a poker game conversation with MIT professor Ron Rivest — a pioneer in public key cryptography — inspired David to start a company that would end up revolutionizing internet security. While also working as an investor at Bessemer, David founded Verisign to stand up the internet’s first certificate authority. Despite the unconventional business model of “selling integers,” David was able to convince Bessemer to invest in his startup. This paid off when Netscape agreed to include Versign’s public key in their browser in exchange for one percent equity. Verisign introduced the iconic lock symbol that universally signals an encrypted browser session and paved the way for secure internet commerce as we know it today.
Betting on moonshots
David’s investment philosophy is to back early stage companies with moonshot ideas that have the potential to change the world. This approach led him to invest in deep tech companies such as Rocket Lab, a New Zealand-based startup aiming to launch payload rockets into space. It’s a goal that many industry experts dismissed as impossible to achieve for a team of young, inexperienced aerospace engineers. But David believed in CEO Peter Beck’s vision all the way back in 2014, and since their first successful launch in 2017, Rocket Lab has become a workhorse for delivering satellites that impact global communications, agriculture, and climate studies today. Beyond Earth’s orbit, Rocket Lab has built and/or delivered NASA payloads to the Moon, Venus and Mars.
