Industry Private equity Website www.formation8.com Founded 2011 Type of business Private | Products Venture capital Founder Joe Lonsdale Headquarters San Francisco Total assets 448 million USD | |
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Formation 8 partner joe lonsdale backstage disrupt ny 2013
Formation 8 is an American venture capital firm founded in 2011 by Joe Lonsdale, Jim Kim and Brian Koo. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
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Jim Kim
Kim used to be a partner at Khosla Ventures, and before that was a senior partner at CMEA. Kim began his career at General Electric where he worked in the Structured Finance and Energy Financial Services Division, founding the Energy Technology Ventures group. Kim serves as an adjunct professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management teaching courses on green energy and entrepreneurship. Kim has an MBA from Columbia University and holds undergraduate degrees in computer science, electrical engineering and political science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Brian Bonwoong Koo
Koo founded InnovationHub, which helped his family business LS Group, source investment opportunities. Koo also co-founded Harbor Pacific Capital, a venture capital fund which was focused on helping young technology companies navigate business development in Asia. Koo holds an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and an undergraduate degree in economics from Stanford University where he was classmates with Lonsdale.
Joe Lonsdale
Lonsdale founded Anduin Ventures, a seed fund focused on Silicon Valley. Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2004 with Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. In a 2013 interview, he indicated interests in government, finance, healthcare, energy and logistics.
Founding
In 2012, Formation 8 intended to close its first round fund with $200 million, but delayed until 2013 to accommodate more limited partners. Lonsdale revealed the limited partners of Formation 8 includes "founders of PayPal, Palantir, Yahoo, and Yammer, plus Asian conglomerates and some New York institutions." The team was later joined by James Zhang of Softbank China Venture Capital and BioDiscovery and Tom Baruch, founder of CMEA Capital and Director of Intermolecular. The firm added Gideon Yu, the former Facebook Chief Financial Officer who is now president of the San Francisco 49ers, as a special adviser to the firm.
Fortune Magazine described the firm as "the hottest venture capital since Andreessen."
In April 2013, it closed its first round fund with $448 million.