Andy Funk Email & Phone Number

Pacific Palisades, Ca, Us

Funk Ventures is my investment platform of choice. After having built and sold three companies by the age of 24, I wanted to figure out how to streamline my entrepreneurial desires but still be able to manage having my hands in multiple businesses at the same time. Venture capital became the obvious choice for me, leading to the formation of this firm. Back then, as the youngest founding member of a VC firm in the country, I had dozens ideas of what venture capital should be all about. After many years in the venture business, I came to realize that my philanthropic days after founding Helping.org were just the beginning. I turned Funk Ventures into an early pioneer in the socially responsible and impact investing space and made a name for myself as a thought and opinion leader, focusing exclusively on companies that have the ability to make the world a better place. Sounds a little cheesy for a venture capitalist? Well, maybe not - our portfolio companies have not just improved the environment or people's lives, they have also literally saved countless of innocent lives - all while still generating healthy returns for their shareholders. Everybody wins, and that's how I like it!

I love investing and helping other companies grow, but occasionally, I return to my roots as a startup entrepreneur - 2007 was one of those years. The birth of the Pink Lotus Breast Center came serendipitously from my marriage to my wife Kristi who, at the time, was a breast surgeon and director at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center. The combination of my entrepreneurial innovation with Kristi's superior medical abilities led to the realization that we could conjointly create a breast cancer organization that would provide a level of care that patients could not experience anywhere else. We opened the doors of the first Pink Lotus Breast Center in Los Angeles in early 2009 amidst a deep recession and the impending birth of our triplet sons a few months away. Despite what turned out to be the hardest years of our lives, we have since turned the Pink Lotus Breast Center into a leading institution and respected thought leader in the international medical community.

Pacific Palisades, Ca, Us

I joined the board of Urban Compass to reach the underserved urban youth and guide them toward a hopeful future by showing them that a world of possibility exists "out there". The focus of Urban Compass is to inspire the youth and to help them achieve their dreams through education, mentoring and enrichment activities. Urban Compass operates after school and summer programs at Verbum Dei High School to serve students from 112th Street Elementary School and Sage Child Care Center (these are some of the worst neighborhoods in LA). The organization provides tutoring support, enrichment activities and field trips to keep the children engaged in a positive learning experience, and most importantly, to keep them off the streets.

Microdyme was my first entrepreneurial venture. I founded this company in Germany while I was still in high school, a short while before I came to the US. It's safe to say that this company taught me countless lessons about what to do (and what not to do) in business. Our premise was to make the Internet more fun by being experts in vector technology and animation - something we were very good at. The first one is never easy, but it nonetheless turned into quite a success. Microdyme was acquired by iBoost Technology in 2000 in a cash and stock transaction.

Daily F1 was a fun venture. My brother and I both loved Formula 1 while growing up in Germany, so why not build the world's biggest and most content-rich Formula 1 website to provide hardcore fans with all the data, pictures, videos, interviews and commentary they could ever want? Daily F1 was a joint effort at the beginning, but my brother eventually took over all management after I got too busy with my companies in the United States. Daily F1 was my earliest experience with what venture capital sometimes feels like: invest, nurture, direct but then have it run and grown by competent team that doesn't include you. Daily F1 was acquired by Total F1.

One evening in 1998, at the age of 21, I sat in my car in a bad neighborhood in downtown LA when a homeless guy walked by my car, knocked on the hood, and looked me straight in the eyes. Just a few hours earlier, I had watched a report on CNN about how the Internet was turning people into millionaires left and right. I thought: "Why not use the Internet to help this guy"? Helping.org was born and pioneered the concept of online giving. America Online also wanted to get their feet wet with online giving and acquired Helping.org just one year later, in 1999. Helping.org, now known as Network for Good, became one of the largest providers of online charitable giving in the world.