From 2003 until joining Seneca, David served as a member of Endurance Ventures, LLC. Endurance is the manager of two traditional venture capital funds with total assets of over $60 million and two sole-purpose investment funds totaling almost $5 million. His duties at Endurance Ventures included evaluating, researching and assessing market opportunities for existing portfolio companies. In addition, he assisted with acquisitions, divestitures and other strategic initiatives, including advising NWP Services Corp., a portfolio company, in the sale of its software division to Accenture, and closing a $30 million outsourcing contract between Accenture and the selling company.
David began his Wall Street career at Hambrecht Quist in 1983 as an associate analyst covering the software and IT services industries. He was involved in a variety of IPOs, including Informix, SHL Systemhouse and Paychex, among others. His coverage universe included Oracle, Microsoft, Sybase, EDS, Computer Sciences, Ashton-Tate, Lotus, CA, Cognos, Business Objects, Shared Medical Systems and HBO Company, among many others. He was also the first Wall Street technology analyst to publish a software and services industry index that covered the price movements of the component stocks as well as their earnings movements. David was also a member of the H&Q research team that published Wall Street’s first hospital information systems industry investment report. Following Hambrecht Quist, he worked at First Albany-META Technology Research which is now part of Gartner Group.
In 1993, in between his buy side roles on Wall Street, David joined the sell side at O’Connor and Associates in Chicago, then a division of Swiss Bank Corp. He managed a hedge fund consisting of the firm’s own capital, focusing on investments in the technology arena. He also directed the firm’s equity options trading team (then the world’s largest) with the mandate of successfully marrying the volatility inherent in fundamental event-driven research information with the Black-Scholes Options Pricing Model to enhance capital returns.
David’s career has also included raising the seed funding for a start-up software company in 1998 and serving as its CEO. He was also hired personally by Larry Ellison and Jeff Walker (CFO) to work at Oracle to help launch the company’s first applications software solutions in 1990 and 1991.
David attended Brown University and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He is an avid golfer and scuba diver and lives with his wife and two children in Dexter, Michigan.