James Currier

This article is about the businessman. For the footballer, see James Currier (athlete)
James Currier
Born (1967-10-30) October 30, 1967
United States
Occupation Entrepreneur, business executive
Years active 1999-present
Known for Founding Tickle.com, NFX Guild, etc.
Website NFX.com

James Currier (born on October 30, 1967)[1] is an American entrepreneur and business executive, currently known as one of the co-founders and managing partners of the venture firm NFX Guild.[2] Currier's first startup company,[3] the quiz network Tickle.com,[4] was co-founded in 1999, then acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2004[5] for around $100 million.[4][6] In 2007 Currier co-founded OogaLabs in California,[7] a business incubator and investment firm.[4] OogaLabs went on to found a number of digital network and ecommerce companies,[8] for example helping fund Goodreads in November 2007.[1]

Among other startups, Currier co-founded the company Jiff[4][9] in December 2010, also taking the role of chairman.[10] Around 2012 Currier was still serving as the CEO of Wonderhill, the "casual games company" spun off from OogaLabs.[11] Other companies associated with OogaLabs included IronPearl, which was a growth analytics company.[12] With the 2013 Paypal acquisition of IronPearl, Currier became a growth advisor for Paypal.[12] In 2015,[13][14] Currier and Stan Chudnovsky left OogaLabs and partnered with investor Gigi Levy-Weiss to form NFX Guild in Silicon Valley.[13] A contributor to publications such as TechCrunch,[15] Currier is also a Big Think Delphi Fellow.[11]

Early life and education

James Currier was born on October 30, 1967 in the United States.[1] He went to Princeton and Phillips Exeter Academy as part of his education.[16][17] In 1991 he began working with GTE New Ventures in Hollywood, California, developing digital products and businesses.[18] Currier traveled to Hong Kong in 1993 to begin working at STAR TV, a satellite television broadcaster. He also moved to Beijing to study at the Beijing School of Economics.[18]

Career

Tickle.com (1999-2004)

See also: Tickle.com

Currier returned from China to the United States in 1994, going to work as an associate at Battery Ventures in Boston.[18] Around 1999[7] Currier and programmer Stan Chudnovsky[3] began working together as business partners, and that year they co-founded the American startup company[3] and quiz network Tickle.com[4][11] along with Rick Marini.[19] Originally called Emode.com,[20] among other features the site allowed users to create their own tests, which were available for other users to take.[5] In 2000, Currier moved Tickle to San Francisco.[21] The company survived the dot-com bubble burst of 2000, becoming profitable in early 2002.[5] Eventually the website grew to have $38 million in revenue and nearly 200 million registered users,[18] as well as 80 employees.[1] Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide in May 2004[5] for around $100 million,[4][6] and absorbed into Affinity Labs.[5] Currier and and Tickle were the subject of chapter 28 in Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston in 2009,[22] and were also featured in the Harvard Business Review case study "Tickle" in 2006.[23]

Founding OogaLabs (2007-2008)

Around 2005, Currier took around a year off from business to travel with his family in Switzerland. He began forming a business model for a new venture firm while abroad.[4] In 2007 Currier and Chudovsky founded OogaLabs in California,[7] a business incubator and investment firm[4][24][9][21] described by the founders as their "advising/investing vehicle."[7] Some of the team from Tickle also joined the new firm,[18] with Currier taking on the role of CEO.[1] OogaLabs went on to found a number of digital network and ecommerce companies,[8] for example helping fund Goodreads in November 2007.[1]

As of February 2008, OoogaLabs had 15 designers and engineers who "work in two-man teams to develop ideas in parallel." Currier explained that the point of the system was "to churn out as many promising ideas in as short a time as possible."[25] The Financial Times referred to Currier in a 2008 article as a "trailblazer to [the small-team brainstorming] approach to entrereneurship."[25] At the time, OogaLabs was serving as a holding company for five new business, including GoodTree.[25] Also in 2008,[1] OogaLabs spun out the gaming company Wonderhill. Before it was acquired by Kabam[8] in 2010,[18] the startup put out Dragons of Atlantis and reached USD$60 million in revenue.[1]

IronPearl and other ventures (2009-2014)

Currier was a co-founder and chairman of Medpedia,[11][26] a collaborative wiki project launched in early 2009 with funding from OogaLabs. Its aim was to create an open access medical encyclopedia[26] in association with schools such as Harvard Medical School,[27] as well as other contributors.[28] To qualify to modify main content, approved editors needed an M.D., D.O., or Ph.D. in a biomedical field, while others could contribute by writing in suggestions.[29] The site shut down after around four years of operation.[30] Currier co-founded the company Jiff[4][9] in December 2010, also taking the role of chairman.[10] Operating as a secure network and marketplace for the health care industry,[1][18] Jiff's[4][9] healthcare marketplace raised money from investors like Venrock,[31] GE Capital and Rosemark.[32]

Around 2012 Currier was still serving as the CEO of Wonderhill, the "casual games company" spun off from OogaLabs.[11] Also that year, OogaLabs spun out IronPearl,[18] a company which builds software tools and methodologies to help networks and marketplaces grow.[1] On April 11, 2013, it was announced that with the Paypal acquisition of IronPearl, Chudnovsky would be Paypal's vice president of growth, while Currier would be a growth advisor, though not full-time.[12] Currier and Chudnovsky retained positions at Paypal while continuing to work with OogaLabs,[7][33] with Currier also advising companies such as Wanelo, Angelist, Poshmark, Scripted, Jiff, Goodreads, and PandoDaily.[1]

NFX Guild and recent events (2015-present)

See also: NFX Guild
External video
James Currier at STIRR FounderHacks II "Hit It Hard" (Sep 14, 2007)
NFX co-founders James Currier and Gigi Levy-Weiss speaking at the 2015 NFX conference.

Early in the summer of 2015,[13][14] Currier and Chudovsky left OogaLabs and partnered with investor Gigi Levy-Weiss to form NFX Guild in Silicon Valley.[13][6] The business accelerator and investment fund was created to exclusively cater to network and marketplace companies,[34] with financial backers such as Charles River Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Greylock Partners. As of September 18, 2015, NFX Guild was managing $10 million in investments.[4] As compared to opening an application process to choose portolio companies, NFX Guild established a network of scouts[4] in California and Israel.[14] As part of NFX Guild's business model, each portfolio company was provided with consultation and underwent a three-week program in the Bay Area.[14]

As of September 2015, sixteen companies had "graduated" from the initial NFX Guild program,[4] with eight choosing to change their company names as part of the process.[14] For the "Winter 2016 program," NFX provided each participating startup with "$120,000 in equity based funding."[35] As of 2016, Currier remains chairman of Jiff Inc.[10] A periodic contributor to publications succh as TechCrunch,[15] he is also a Big Think Delphi Fellow.[11] Currier is also a member of the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellows Program.[36]

Personal life

Currier and his family[4] are currently based in Palo Alto, California.[1] He previously was a vocalist with the group The Richter Scales.[29]

Further reading

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 "James Currier". Crunchbase. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  2. ↑ "Company Overview of NFX Guild". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  3. 1 2 3 "Team and About". NFX Guild. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 "James Currier And Stan Chudnovsky Take The Wraps Off Their New Incubator, NFX Guild". TechCrunch. September 18, 2015. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Hendrickson, Mark (April 23, 2008). "No One's Laughing at Tickle". TechCrunch.
  6. 1 2 3 Loizos, Connie (November 8, 2015). "Twenty-Year-Old Shahed Khan Has More Connections Than You Do". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 "About Ooga Labs". oogalabs.com/. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  8. 1 2 3 Kincaid, Jason (October 22, 2010). "Kabam Acquires WonderHill, Wants To Become The Blizzard Of Social Games". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  9. 1 2 3 4 "James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky Requires the Wraps Off Their New Incubator, NFX Guild". The News Worthly. September 18, 2015. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  10. 1 2 3 "James Currier". Linkedin. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Exerpts: James Currier". Big Think. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  12. 1 2 3 Cutler, Kim-Mai (April 11, 2013). "eBay’s PayPal Acquires IronPearl To Fuel Growth Beyond 123M Users". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Takahashi, Dean (October 20, 2015). "How one Israeli investor overcomes fears and continues to invest in games". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Goldenberg, Roy (August 18, 2015). "NFX Guild accelerator unveils summer 2015 class". Globes. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  15. 1 2 "Contributor - James Currier". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  16. ↑ "James P. Currier". LinkedIn. Retrieved 2016-03-11.
  17. ↑ "James P. Currier". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2016-03-11.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "James Currier". Growth Hackers. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  19. ↑ "Business". Nashua Telegraph. 2007. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  20. ↑ Hansell, Saul (March 8, 2004). "Getting to Know Me, Getting to Know All About Me: Web Personality Tests". The New York Times. Retrieved May 25, 2010.
  21. 1 2 Rao, Leena (May 27, 2013). "Ooga Labs Takes A Ground-Up Approach To Generate Growth And Network Effects For Startups". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  22. ↑ Livingston, Jessica (March 11, 2009). "Founders At Work". Apress.
  23. ↑ Sahlman, William A. (November 27, 2006). "Innovation & Entrepreneurship". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 2016-03-11.
  24. ↑ "Ooga Labs Profile". Crunchbase. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  25. 1 2 3 Allison, Kevin (February 19, 2008). "Founders take aim at a bigger target". Financial Times. Retrieved 2016-02-16.
  26. 1 2 "Medpedia Launches Giant Wikipedia-Like Medical And Health Encyclopedia". medicalnewstoday.com. 2008-07-23. Retrieved 2008-07-28.
  27. ↑ Cross, Michael (2008-07-24). "NHS Choices will need to justify its £80m price tag". London: The Guardian - guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-07-28.
  28. ↑ Moore, Matthew (2008-07-23). "Medpedia, the medical Wikipedia, allows patients to diagnose themselves". London: telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-07-28.
  29. 1 2 Nye, Calley (2008-07-22). "MedPedia Is Wikifying the Medical Search Space". Washington Post. Retrieved 2008-07-28.
  30. ↑ "Medpedia, the Medical Wikipedia, is Dead. And we Missed its Funeral… Laika's MedLibLog 12 July 2013".
  31. ↑ Perez, Sarah (September 23, 2014). "Jiff Raises $18 Million Series B To Make Employers’ Digital Health Programs More Personalized". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  32. ↑ Pai, Aditi (May 21, 2015). "Jiff raises $23M from Rosemark, GE Ventures for employee wellness platform". Mobi Health News. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  33. ↑ Byrne Reilly, Richard (March 25, 2014). "PayPal’s secret weapon: A Silicon Valley success story you’ve never heard of". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  34. ↑ Avital, Yaneev (Dec 21, 2015). "The 100 most influential people in Israeli hi-tech in 2015". GeekTime.com. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  35. ↑ Finberg, Ron (December 23, 2015). "iAngels Expands Investment Opportunities with NFX Guild Partnership". Finance Magnates (press release). Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  36. ↑ "Leadership Programs 2009 Class of Henry Crown Fellows". Aspen Institute. 2009. Retrieved 2016-03-11.

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