Photo by Founders Fund
Photo by Frankruddy

Brian Singerman

Partner & Investor

Founders Fund

POSITION

Partner & Investor

COMPANY

Founders Fund

COUNTRY

USA

Website

Founders Fund

SCENE

Business

SOCIAL

LinkedIn

Twitter

What makes Brian Singerman a Global Shaker?

Brian Singerman is a partner at Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in “smart people solving difficult problems”. Peter Thiel, the firm’s founder, was the first investor to take a chance on Facebook, eventually turning $8 million into $376 million.

In 2017, Brian’s investment in stem cell-targeting cancer treatment company Stemcentrx propelled him to the top 5 of Forbes’ Midas List, as the company was acquired by AbbVie for almost $6 billion.

“The main things that differentiate us are we are known to make extremely large concentrated investments”, Brian said in an interview with DRT. “We put the first time we did this we put over ten percent of our first institutional fund into a small unknown company at the time called space X. and everybody thought we were crazy to do that. Wait, what? What do you guys know about rockets? This thing is never going to work. We put such a huge percentage of our fund into it and I would say that company has worked pretty well and we’ve continued to do that throughout our history. We, like I said, we put 150 million dollars into Airbnb at the $2.5 billion round. We put $300 million into Stemcentrx over a couple of different rounds and those conviction bets have been the ones that have worked out the best for us. Also, I don’t think that most other VC firms are completely sector agnostic in the same way that we are. You have to truly be reactive and truly be open to anything to be sector agnostic.”

Before joining Founders Fund, Brian was a software engineering and engineering manager at Google, where he founded the iGoogle web portal. While at Google, he entered the world of angel investing and founded his own fund, the XGYC Fund, to help companies that challenge the status quo. After talking to Sean Parker and learning more about the Founders Fund philosophy, he joined the firm in 2008.

Before joining Google, Brian was an engineer at There.

Tags: Investment and Funding, VC

Last updated: May 16, 2019