Karl Jacob

Carl Jacob is an advisor at 500friends. Mr. Carl Jacob is a managing partner at Elixir Fund. He was the co-founder and CEO of Hangtime. He has served as an advisor, circle member at Founders Circle Capital. Carl is a serial entrepreneur and has been building and advising companies for the past 18 years. He has also worked as a manager at Sun Microsystems and as an executive at Microsoft. During his career, Jacob has raised more than $200 million from prestigious investors such as Amerindo, Microsoft, eBay, Integral Partners, Norwest Ventures, Bay Partners, Benchmark Capital, Deutsche Bank, Ignition Partners, Vulcan Ventures and others. He has founded four companies ranging from zero income to significant income or acquisition. One of his companies, Dimension X, was acquired by Microsoft in 1997, and another, Keen (now Ingenio), was acquired by AT&T in 2007. The companies in which Jacob was CEO brought investors more than $300 million in profits and more than $150 million in revenue a year. He has won numerous awards, including being named one of BusinessWeek’s Top Ten Rookies. Previously, he took Cloudmark from zero revenue and $50,000 in investments to $16 million in investments and millions in revenues. Prior to that, Jacob joined Benchmark Capital as a resident entrepreneur tasked with creating “the next big thing,” which eventually became Keen, where he was CEO and president until May 2002. During his tenure at Keen, Jacob led the company to be recognized as one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies in history and was labeled a “Cool Company” by Fortune. Carl has advised and served on the board of directors of several companies including Facebook, Dimension X, Keen, Cloudmark, IMMI, Protector USA and REAL Kiteboarding. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California, where he serves on the advisory board of the School of Engineering.