Daniel V Leff

Daniel V. Leff is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Waverley Capital, a media- and entertainment-focused venture firm he launched in 2017–2019 alongside Edgar Bronfman Jr., the former chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group and ex-CEO of Seagram. Leff runs the firm's day-to-day operations. The pair initially targeted roughly $100 million for their first fund, positioning Waverley to back disruptive companies across the media and entertainment landscape while leveraging Bronfman's industry relationships and Leff's investing track record.

Leff has been a technology, media, and telecom (TMT) investor for more than 15 years. Before Waverley, he founded Luminari Capital in 2013, a top-performing fund focused on the global $500B+ video and media ecosystem. Earlier, he was a Partner at Globespan Capital Partners (Palo Alto) and served as Executive Vice President and Managing Director at Harris & Harris Group (NASDAQ: TINY), a publicly held venture firm. Earlier in his career he worked at Sevin Rosen Funds and Redpoint Ventures, and held engineering, marketing, and strategic-investment roles at Intel Corporation.

He is best known for his long involvement with Roku, where he served on the board from roughly 2011 to 2018 and chaired the audit committee through the company's transition to a public company. He is frequently described as a contrarian investor who is comfortable operating outside mainstream venture consensus, betting on media-technology opportunities that generalist investors often struggle to understand.

Academically, Leff earned a B.S. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from UCLA, and an MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management, where he was an Anderson Venture Fellow and now serves on the Board of Visitors.

• Invests in "innovative and disruptive" companies across the media and entertainment technology ecosystem — streaming/video, content, audio/podcasting, consumer, gaming/VR, and adjacent platforms.
• Operates with a deliberately contrarian posture; as profiled by Venture Unlocked, he believes "very few investors truly are comfortable with consistently thinking outside of mainstream consensus" and treats deep media-domain conviction as an edge generalists lack.
• Treats strategic, high-net-worth and industry LPs as a core differentiator — systematically "activating" limited partners to open doors and provide distribution/partnerships for portfolio companies.
• Leads rounds and is active across stages (seed through later venture), with reported individual check sizes in the ~$500K–$10M range.
• Edge comes from operating credibility bridging disruptive startups and legacy media incumbents (the Bronfman + Leff combination).