Interview with Charles Birnbaum, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
Charles Birnbaum, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
Originally posted on medium.com.
In our latest podcast, David Gogel (Wharton MBA ’18) talks with Charles Birnbaum (Wharton MBA ’11), Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a venture capital fund with $4.5B under management that invests in startups from seed stage to growth.
Charles focuses on financial services, consumer and education investments. He is actively involved with many BVP portfolio companies, including Main Street Hub, BrightBytes, Bread Finance, and August Home. He currently serves on the board of Zopa, United Capital, Fabric, Spruce and Eave and was involved in the exits of Yodle, 2U, and Kroll Bond Ratings. Charles’ startup experience has been important to BVP’s early stage financial services portfolio, which includes high-potential companies such as Betterment and Quantopian.
Take a listen here:
Podcast Overview:
Charles’ background and how he broke into the venture capital industry
Overview of BVP
Traits in successful FinTech entrepreneurs
BVP’s approach to investing using industry roadmaps
Opportunities in the cryptocurrencies / blockchain market
Opportunities and risks with initial coin offerings, and potential impact on the venture capital industry
Trends in “InsurTech” (distribution, cyber, mortgage, title)
Relationship between startups & incumbents, opportunities for exit
Valuation of alternative lending / tech-enabled specialty finance companies
Trends in FinTech — online rebundling of financial services using tech
Tips for Wharton FinTech members interested in working in venture capital, working at fintech startup, or launching a fintech venture
Prior to joining BVP in 2013, Charles spent more than three years at Foursquare, the location-based mobile application company based in New York, helping create and bring to market some of Foursquare’s first merchant-facing tools. As the company grew, Charles became the director of mobile and international business development, where he focused on building strategic partnerships with carriers and OEMs while leading the company’s business development efforts in key growth markets such as Brazil, Russia and Turkey. Prior to Foursquare, Charles spent six years in investment banking and equity capital markets focusing on the technology, media and telecom sectors, and executed more than 50 equity and equity-linked public offerings.
Charles holds a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School, a Master of Arts in international studies from the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Arts in history from Northwestern University.
Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is a venture capital fund with $4.5B under management, that invests in consumer, enterprise and healthcare technology startups around the world, from seed stage to growth. BVP funded the early stages of Pinterest, Blue Apron, Skype, Skybox Imaging, Twitch and Periscope and helped build 121 IPOs including Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, Shopify and Wix.
