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The Charmed Life

By ClientWise | March 3, 2010

It's good to be Google. Better yet, it's good to be part of charmed Google alumni who lived through Google's seminal growth period.

Chris Sacca lives in Truckee, CA...a funky, hip former-mining town close to Lake Tahoe, just off of route 80 in the Sierra Nevadas. Most mornings he hikes/snowshoes before breakfast. Every few weeks he makes the 4-5 hour commute to San Francisco, where he checks in with his companies.

Today, Chris Sacca is one of the 40 ex-Googlers who have invested in 200 companies since 2005. As a fresh-faced Georgetown law school grad, Sacca joined Google in 2003. As head of Special Initiatives at Google, Sacca was on the front-lines in seeing all inbound business proposals. Each day, he saw 50-70 new ideas.

Sacca left Google in 2007, and struck out on his own. In 2007, he was one of the first investors in Twitter, chipping in $50,000. He's done more than two dozen other deals, including FanBridge, a NYC-based company that makes software that helps musicians manage marketing and relationships with their fans.

In December of 2008, late one Friday night, Sacca sent out a Tweet asking if there were any "bootstrapped" and profitable start-ups working late on Friday night. Soon someone responded, "We're FanBridge, and we work late every Friday night." A few weeks later, Sacca flew to New York to meet the FanBridge founders. Within months, Sacca invested $50,000 in FanBridge...as well as pulling in hundreds of thousands from other VC buddies. Today, FanBridge serves 55 million music fans.

Once a year, Sacca joins a regular event hosted by another ex-Googler, Aydin Senkut. Since departing Google in 2005, Senkut has invested between $25,000 and $150,000 each...in 60 different start-ups. Each year, Senkut organizes a gathering for ex-Googlers, VC angels and entrepreneurs at spots like the Calafia Cafe in Palo Alto, CA...which is owned by Google's first in-house chef. Main topics of conversation at this gathering: tech trends and how to get rich(er).

For more info on these modern day Medicis, check out this BusinessWeek article, "And Google Begat".

Question: If you were are a financial advisor, how would you serve someone like Chris Sacca or Aydin Senkut? How would you meet them? What would you say to someone who sees 50 new pitches each day?

For more on Chris Sacca, join him on Twitter. For ideas on how to pitch him, go here! To contact Chris, go here!

Cheers! Good luck!

Topics: Business Development

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