Adam Nash, a Silicon Valley-born-and-bred operator and investor, is back at it again.
Today, on his personal blog, he announced that he has started a consumer fintech company that has already garnered initial funding from Ribbit Capital, along with other “friends and angels” who appear to have also pitched into the round, including Box CEO Aaron Levie, Mighty Networks founder Gina Bianchini, Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra and Amy Chang, who sold her startup Accompany to Cisco in 2018.
Nash didn’t reveal many details in the post or later on Twitter, saying he’ll have more to say when the company is closer to launching. But a new SEC filing suggests the company is called Silverback Ventures and that it has raised $4.85 million so far. Nash also co-founded the company with Alejandro Crosa, an Argentinian software engineer who most recently spent five months at Slack but logged more than three years at both Twitter and LinkedIn before that.
Nash said on Twitter that the two met at LinkedIn, where Nash was himself VP of product management for four years beginning in 2007. It’s a good detail to know, considering that Nash has logged time at a wide variety of tech outfits over the years, making it hard to guess at whom he knows and from where.
A computer science graduate of Stanford, where he later nabbed a master’s degree, Nash began his career interning at NASA, HP and Trilogy before landing his first big job as a software engineer at Apple in 1996 (when former PepsiCo exec John Sculley was briefly running the place).
After moving on to a bubble-era company that no longer exists, Nash tried his hand at VC for the first time, joining Atlas Venture as an associate. To get more operating experience, he then jumped to eBay, where he was a director; LinkedIn, where he met Crosa; then Greylock, where he spent just over a year as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) before joining the wealth-management startup Wealthfront as its president and CEO.
A little more than four years later, in 2016, Wealthfront’s original CEO and founder, Andy Rachleff, reclaimed the role. But Nash didn’t disappear from the scene. Instead, he rejoined Greylock as an EIR for another year before joining Dropbox shortly after it went public in 2018 as its VP of product and growth, leaving that post back in February to start his own thing, he said on his way out the door.
That Nash would start a fintech company specifically isn’t surprising, considering his involvement with Wealthfront, as well as some of the personal investments he has made in recent years.
In 2018, for example, he wrote a check to LearnLux, a five-year-old, Boston-based educational startup that helps employees better understand their 401(k), health savings accounts and stock options. He is also an investor in Human Interest, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that offers automated, paperless 401(k) plans.
Nash is also riding a very big wave. According to PitchBook, consumer fintech is on pace to attract a record amount of venture funding in 2020, at least in North America and Europe.
Either way, it’s notable that Nash is trying his hand at starting a company from scratch for the first time in his career, and we’ll let you know more about what he’s building as soon as he’s ready to share more.
The little that Nash is saying publicly for now is that he and Crosa believe there is “still a lot more to do in consumer fintech, and that through software we can help bring purpose to the way people approach their financial lives.”
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