Seth Levine

Seth has been working in and with early stage businesses for almost 20 years.

When not working with start-up companies you might find Seth cycling the back roads and hills near Boulder, climbing up or skiing down a mountain or spending time with his wife and three kids.

Seth’s career spans venture capital investing as well as operational, transactional and advisory roles at both public and private companies. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Seth began his venture capital career at Mobius Venture Capital.

Prior to Mobius, Seth joined a restart of the data communications company, FirstWorld Communications. He was the third employee of a new management team with a goal to transition what had been a traditional competitive local exchange carrier (“CLEC”) into the data and Internet world. Seth held the corporate finance half of the CFO position where he started and led the finance, mergers and acquisitions and investor relations groups. Seth then led the IPO process for FirstWorld’s IPO in 2000 and negotiated simultaneous equity investments from Microsoft, SAIC and Lucent Technologies, eventually raising over $260 million from the IPO and these side-by-side equity transactions. When the company decided to focus on its data center and hosting business, Seth assumed operational control of the remainder of the business and led the ISP, telephony and network integration portions of the company, representing in total approximately $40 million in revenue with over 200 employees. He managed the sale of these lines of business in 2001.

Prior to joining FirstWorld Seth held various corporate development and business development positions. He started his career in Morgan Stanley’s telecommunications investment banking group.

Seth is a summa cum laude graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota with degrees in both Economics and Psychology. He serves as a Trustee of the college. Seth is active throughout the entrepreneurial community in both the US and globally. He’s an advisor to a number of venture funds, including Sadara, the first ever Palestinian focused venture fund and The Greater Colorado Venture Fund (a fund focused on economic development in rural Colorado) as well as several other funds operating in North America, the Middle East and Africa. He’s a founder of Pledge 1% – an international organization that encourages companies to give back to their local communities through gifts of equity, profits, product and time (Pledge has over 2,000 member companies). Seth is a former board member of The Unreasonable Institute, formerly on the board and executive committee of the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association, previously on the board of the Bard Center for Entrepreneurship at CU Denver, also previously on the board of the Denver chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) and is a past Chair of the ESPRIT Awards. Seth is a founding member of the Colorado Chapter of the Entrepreneur’s Foundation as well as Colorado Entrepreneurial By Nature and also serves on the executive committee of StartupColorado (a public/private partnership in Colorado formed to promote economic development in rural Colorado).