Timothy C. Draper, MBA 1984

Timothy C. Draper, HBS 1984, started his career with a brief stint with Alex, Brown & Sons, the first investment bank in the United States. In 1985, he cofounded Draper and Associates, later renamed Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). DFJ maintains a loosely affiliated network of semi-independent venture capital firms in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The firm has funded notable technology companies including Baidu, Hotmail, and Skype. Tim’s original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based email to virally spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses. Tim credits the idea to his case study education at HBS. He talked about his experiences in venture capital in an interview at HBS in December 2010.