Over the years, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth have been using their experience and exit experience, ranging from social networks to investment companies, from technology giants to cryptocurrency exchanges, to build Clubhouse. Let’s look at the impressive experiences of these two founding partners together.
The two names behind the success of the Clubhouse are Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. The success of the voice-based social network, which reaches 2 million active users per week in 7 months, is quite impressive. Let’s get to know these two founding partners closely.
WHO IS PAUL DAVISON?
Paul Davison, who studied Industrial Engineering at Stanford University between 1998-2002, completed his MBA at Stanford GSB and was awarded the Arjay Miller award at his graduation. Let us say that this award is given to 10 percent of the graduates with the highest academic scores. Davison completed his MBA in 2007 and started his career as a Senior Consultant at Bain & Company.
FIRST STEP INTO THE ENTERPRISE WORLD
When we look at Paul Davison’s background, we see that he was more interested in small startups than big tech companies. Davison, who worked on the Operations side at Google for a short period of 4 months, later served as Deputy General Manager at Metaweb Technologies.
Paul Davison led the business partnerships of Metaweb Technologies for more than 3 years, taking a close interest in product design, product marketing, PR, user testing and finances. Metaweb, which was acquired by Google in 2010, became an important part of the Google Knowledge Graph, which was in its early stages at that time.
CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH INVESTMENT COMPANIES
At this point, we can say that Paul Davison has gained an important experience in the name of entrepreneurship. He started working at Benchmark Capital in 2010 to utilize this knowledge and experience. Davison, who held the Entrepreneur in Residence position here, was responsible for managing high-growth early-stage or small ventures. Here, we can explain the high growth expression with the number of employees and annual income criteria.
HE SOLD HIS FIRST VENTURE TO PINTEREST
After working at Benchmark Capital for 1 year, Davison will be tired of trying to grow other startups; In 2011 he decided to start his own venture and set up the location-based Highlight, which allows you to discover people near you. The venture has received investment by Benchmark, DFJ and other key investors. Paul Davison, who took the position of CEO at Highlight, sold his venture to Pinterest after 4 years. So Davison’s Pinterest adventure started.
Paul Davison, who worked as the product leader of Utility organ at Pinterest, was responsible for User Profiles, Boards, pin zooming, user content generation (UGC) and shopping features. In addition, Davison was closely involved with teamwork and platform strategy at the time. Davison, who worked for Pinterest for nearly 2 years between 2016 and 2018, turned his eyes to the world of crypto money from social networks in 2018.
PAUL DAVISON’S ENTRY INTO THE CRYPTOCURRENCY WORLD
Paul Davison switched to cryptocurrency exchange Coinlist after Pinterest. Coinlist serves those who want to invest in new cryptocurrencies at an early stage. Davison helped scale the venture and served as CEO for over a year. Yet there is nothing like one’s own initiative! After all these experiences, Davison, who founded Alpha Exploration with Rohan Seth, created the new voice-based social ap Clubhouse. When we look at Davison’s past experiences, we can say that Clubhouse’s success will increase exponentially.
WHO IS ROHAN SETH?
Just like Paul Davison, Rohan Seth, who studied at Stanford University, graduated from Computer Engineering and also got a master’s degree in Science and Engineering Management from Stanford University. Seth, who interned at Xerox and Stanford in 2004, joined the Google team in 2006. Unlike Davison, Seth was more receptive to long-term employment at tech companies. However, this did not prevent Rohan Seth from being an entrepreneur from the very beginning. Seth built many startups at Google from scratch.
ROHAN SETH’S COMPANY EXPERIENCE THAT SHAPED GOOGLE
One of the first members of Google’s mobile team, Seth worked in the product and development areas of Android, Google Maps and location platform. Seth, co-founder of the “enterprise” department within Google, used machine learning in location, social and search signals to develop Google products.
Seth, also the founder and technology leader of Google’s User Location platform, helped build products such as the Google Location History dashboard.