About me

I’m an Inc. 500 CEO, serial entrepreneur, real estate developer and financial technology investor, and have founded or funded over 100 pioneering companies. I’ve been described by Forbes as "New York's Archangel", by BusinessWeek as a "world conquering entrepreneur", by Crain's New York Business as "the father of angel investing in New York”, and by Red Herring magazine as "patriarch of Silicon Alley". I’m the New York Times best-selling author of both Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money & Having Fun Investing in Startups, and The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business. As an entrepreneurial executive, I am the Founder and CEO of the US Real Estate Market, an innovative capital markets platform for fractionalized institutional investment in commercial real estate. I’m also the Founder and Executive Chairman of Gust, which operates the world's largest online platform and community for entrepreneurs and early-stage investors. Gust is used by over a million entrepreneurs in 193 countries to connect with over 85,000 early-stage investors and is the official collaboration and deal flow management platform for over a thousand business angel networks, accelerators and venture capital funds. I’m the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of New York Angels; Managing Director of Rose Tech Ventures; was a Founding General Partner of True Global Ventures; and Co-Founder of the AREA PropTech venture accelerator. I’m an Associate Founder of—and was Founding Track Chair for Finance, Entrepreneurship and Economics of—Singularity University, the post-graduate program in exponential technologies, and I chair the Venture Capital committee of the Real Estate Board of NY. I was the initial investor and Chairman of the Board of each of JUMP Bikes, acquired by Uber; Comixology, acquired by Amazon; Pond5, acquired by Accel; and Panjiva, acquired by S&P Global. These days I am Chairman of BookitnGo, applying blockchain technology to the hospitality industry; and Thinkable, a breakthrough venture in Artificial Intelligence; and I serve as a board director of cybersecurity developer KoolSpan. I am an active early-stage investor in companies including RealtyMogul, DSTLRY, and nextGenHQ. From my initial involvement with the first online communities in the 1970s, through pioneering the field of real estate technology in the 1980s, developing one of the first wireless data information networks in the 1990s and the first global angel investing platform in the 2000s, creating the first Company as a Service platform in the 2010s and a unique real estate capital market platform in the 2020s, i have continually been at the forefront of innovation in business and financial technology. Among the fields in which I have been actively involved as an executive, board member or investor are: real estate development and investment, proptech, financial technology, capital markets platforms, wireless communications, consumer electronics, crowdsourcing, international finance, social networking, space tourism, user-generated content, online video, mobile network security, biological testing, electronic music, citizen journalism, out-of-home advertising, fiber-optic networking, concierge medicine, online marketing, interactive voice response, and many others. I’ve been privileged to discover and mentor high-potential entrepreneurs, and have been profiled by BusinessWeek as "The Pitch Coach" for my ability to help CEOs perfect their fundraising skills. I’m a regular speaker at the TED conferences, and my TEDtalk on How to Pitch a VC has been viewed over a million and a half times. I’ve been named a Top Writer for five years in a row by Quora, the knowledge-based website where my more than twelve thousand answer to questions about entrepreneurship and investing have garnered me over 100,000 followers. My writings have been featured in Inc. magazine, Huffington Post, Slate, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. I’m a frequent lecturer at business schools including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, Stanford, UVA, CUNY, and Stevens, and was named Mentor of the Year by NYU's Stern School of Business. Prior to founding AirMedia Corporation in 1988, for which I served as CEO for over ten years, my career included over fifteen years in real estate development, government, teaching and urban planning. I was co-founder and Chairman of The Computer Classroom and Vice President, Development at Rose Associates, Inc. Earlier, I served as Deputy Director of the New York office of US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A native New Yorker, I have a BA in Urban Affairs from Yale University, an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School and a D. Eng. (hc) from Stevens Institute of Technology. I am a graduate of PS 6 in the New York City public school system and of Horace Mann High School. I aman Associate Fellow of Pierson College at Yale University, a member of the Entrepreneurship Advisory Boards of Columbia Business School and Yale University, and an advisor to the Alan B. Levan NSU | Broward Center of Innovation. I can be followed online @davidsrose