Eric Di Benedetto

Eric Di Benedetto is the founder and angel investor of Active Starts. He founded the firm in 2006, having started a professional angel investment program in 2003. He is co-founder and general partner of Convergence Partners. He has more than 16 years of experience in Silicon Valley venture capital as an investor in start-up enterprise software, mobile app and digital media companies. He is an advisor to GoShare. Since 1991, he has invested in more than 40 companies as a venture capitalist or angel investor. His investments have already led to ten public offerings and four sales to public companies. He has been an angel investor in several companies. Before founding Convergence Partners in 1997, he was managing director of U.S. venture capital funds managed by BANEXI. Prior to his career as a venture capital investor, he was a transaction and restructuring specialist at PARGESA/Lambert Brussels Group and a defense electronics M&A lawyer at Deutsche Bank (formerly Bankers Trust Company). His career as a software investor began in the early 1990s with the client-server technology wave. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of Asia-Silicon Valley Connection. He has served on the boards of ten Convergence Partners investment companies. He serves on the boards of Clickability, IdeaBlade, Plastyc, RapLeaf and was a board member of RateItAll. He was featured in Business Week’s “Go West, Young Whiz” in March 1998 and in The European “Where the Brains Drain” in June 1998. He lectured on venture capital to graduate students at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. In December 2003 he presented his analysis of the success potential of French technology start-ups to the venture capital industry in Paris. He was recently invited to speak on “China Valley Connect” at the China Connect conference in Beijing, China, in October 2004. He is a supporter of Singularity University.