Scott GarberInvestor

United States - Washington DC-Baltimore Area

It all started with brownies and baseball cards. Then came lemonade and a larger card table. Before long, my 8-year old sidewalk empire had a formal pricing scheme, two part-time employees (my parents), and even a few not-so-hostile acquisitions.

Fourteen years later, after a surprisingly successful Beanie Babies business and Pokémon coding company in middle school, I sold my second (real) business. In many ways, Puppystock (2005-2007) was the natural extension of my neighborhood dessert and card dealing business. While my co-founder and I eventually grew our tiny little online store into a multi-million dollar company and disrupted how pet products were sold, we were soon distracted by the shine of a new idea. Before we sold Puppystock, we had already started on FriendTones (2007-2008) – a mobile social networking and technology company intertwined with the new Facebook application market. Although one of our applications became the Napster of ringtones (when people actually used ringtones), I still use pieces of our technology every day with my phone, and so do you.

By 2008, ringtones had lost their popularity and I had moved on to designing, creating, and managing three analytics programs for Director-level personnel at two Intelligence agencies (CIA & NGA). From 2011-2013, I acquired experience at a family investment office and worked on the full lifecycle of multiple US-based venture capital deals with a prominent angel investor. From 2013-2014, I dually completed a full-time MBA program and co-founded a new family office that managed alternative investment funds for a very wealthy family abroad (and became an international tax expert).

Now, I’ve found my next lemonade stand – with the opportunity to leverage my experiences as a serial entrepreneur, (former) tornado chaser turned venture capitalist at Early Light Ventures.