David Pakman, Partner
Venrock Associates

As a Partner at Venrock in New York, David focuses on early stage venture investing in digital media companies. His active investments include Media6Degrees, a behavioral targeting advertising technology company utilizing the social graph and Crunchyroll, the leading video site focused on Japanese anime. Previously, Pakman was the CEO of eMusic, the world’s leading digital retailer of independent music, second only to iTunes in number of downloads sold. After buying eMusic from Vivendi Universal, in the three years that Pakman ran it, he grew the business by more than 850%, from $7M in revenues to more than $68M. Pakman transformed the business from an obscure also-ran with 50,000 subscribers to the second largest digital music retailer in the world, with more than 400,000 subscribers and more than 12% market share.

Prior to joining eMusic, Pakman was Co-Founder and President of Business Development and Public Policy at Myplay, Inc., the digital music company he founded in 1999 in Redwood City, CA that introduced the "digital music locker" and pioneered the locker category. In 2001, Myplay was sold to Bertelsmann’s ecommerce Group. Before Myplay, he was Vice President at N2K Entertainment, which created the first digital music download service. He also was the co-creator of Apple Computer’s Music Group.

Pakman is a graduate of and a member of the Board of Overseers at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science with a degree in Computer Science Engineering, serves on the Leadership Committee for the UJA-NY’s Music For Youth, and is an avid musician and songwriter.

Venrock is a premier venture capital firm with offices in Palo Alto, New York, Cambridge, MA, and Israel. Originally established as the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, Venrock continues an eight-decade tradition of partnering with entrepreneurs to establish successful, enduring companies. Having invested $2.3 billion in 430 companies resulting in 124 IPOs and 126 M&A exits over the past 40 years, Venrock's investment returns place it among the top tier venture capital firms that have achieved consistently superior performance. With a primary focus on technology, healthcare, and energy, portfolio companies have included Apple Computer, Centocor, Check Point Software, DoubleClick, Gilead Sciences, Idec Pharmaceuticals, Illumina, Intel, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Sirna Therapeutics, and StrataCom.

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