David Wu

David Wu is a General Partner at Maveron, the consumer-only venture capital firm co-founded by Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan with offices in San Francisco and Seattle and over $1.3 billion under management. He joined Maveron in 2012 initially as a Venture Partner to help identify new investments in emerging consumer internet companies, later rising to General Partner. Wu describes himself as a "serial entrepreneur first, investor second," bringing deep operator experience to every deal he evaluates. He is a Bay Area native and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University.

Wu began his career writing C++ code at enterprise software companies Scitor and Synopsys before spending a decade at Homestead.com, where he served as Chief Product Officer, CFO, and COO. He helped grow Homestead to over 400,000 paying subscribers and shepherded its $170 million acquisition by Intuit in 2007. Following the acquisition, he served as Vice President in Intuit's Small Business Group, managing businesses including QuickBooks Online and Intuit.com. Before joining Maveron, he was also Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Redpoint Ventures and personally invested in over 25 startups.

Outside of investing, Wu is deeply involved in music and the arts. He is a member of the Recording Academy and serves on the boards of the GRAMMY Museum and GRAMMY Foundation. He is also a frequent mentor and coach at top Bay Area accelerators including Y Combinator, AngelPad, 500 Startups, and Stanford's StartX. He is known for adventurous personal projects, including building a houseboat and cruising down the Mississippi River.

Wu specializes in consumer experiences at the intersection of software, hardware, and services. He actively seeks category-defining companies where the consumer brand relationship serves as the true moat -- not the underlying technology. His focus at Maveron centers on the "reinvention of entertainment," particularly technology at the intersection of media, gaming, and social. He looks for companies that empower consumers to live on their terms and identifies investment opportunities by observing changes in consumer behavior before they become obvious. Key verticals include consumer health, e-commerce, hardware, AR/VR, social commerce, marketplaces, consumer internet, and fintech. Wu evaluates founders through a personal "Founder Scorecard" framework and has publicly identified 10 key traits he believes make a successful founder.