Chris Sacca

Christopher Sacca (born May 12, 1975) is an American venture investor, company advisor, entrepreneur, and lawyer.

Chris Sacca was born on May 12, 1975, and raised in Lockport, a suburb of Buffalo.

His father was an attorney, while his mother was a professor at SUNY Buffalo State.

Sacca is of Irish and Italian descent, with family originating from Calabria, Italy.

Sacca's parents exposed him to a variety of interests, and he recalls being pulled out of school to attend science museums and book-readings.

His brother is actor Brian Sacca.

Sacca attended The Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He spent semesters abroad at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Quito, Ecuador, University College Cork, in Cork, Ireland, and the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain.

He graduated in 1997 cum laude with a B.S. in foreign service and was an Edmund Evans Memorial Scholar as well as a Weeks Family Foundation Scholar.

He was a member of The Tax Lawyer law review and was honored as the school's Philip A. Ryan and Ralph J. Gilbert Memorial Scholar.

He recalls that he managed to graduate without attending class, obtaining class notes by throwing an annual keg party where entry required classmates to dump their notes in a bin.

By leveraging trades for significant amounts (discovering a flaw in the software of online trading brokers in 1998) he managed to turn $10–20 thousand into $12 million by 2000.

Eventually, when the market crashed, Sacca found himself in debt with a four million dollar negative balance.

He graduated from Georgetown University with a Juris Doctor cum laude in law and technology in 2000.

Sacca used his student loans to start a company during law school, and when the venture proved unsuccessful he used the remaining funds to start trading on the stock market.

In 2000 Sacca began his career as an associate at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley where he handled venture capital, mergers, acquisitions, and licensing transactions for technology clients including Macromedia, VeriSign, and Kleiner Perkins.

Laid off in September 2001, after approximately 13 months, he spent the next several months attending networking events and ‘surviving’ in Silicon Valley by drafting contracts and doing voice over work as a freelancer.

Creating the consulting firm The Salinger Group for networking purposes, he landed at Speedera Networks in May 2002.

In November 2003 Sacca was hired at Google as Corporate Counsel, where he reported to General Counsel David Drummond.

As part of the legal and business development team, his first mandate was to find large amounts of data space, by negotiating and signing agreements around the world.

Sacca served as Head of Special Initiatives at Google Inc. leading the alternative access and wireless divisions.

Among his projects were the 700 MHz and TV white spaces spectrum initiatives, Google's data center in Oregon, and the free citywide WiFi network in Mountain View, California.

Sacca also led many of Google's business development and mergers and acquisitions transactions and was on the founding team of the company's New Business Development organization.

He was among the first Google employees given the Founders’ Award, the company's highest honor.

While at Google, Sacca began investing in companies as an angel investor.

He served as a professional advisor to companies for a variety of matters, including strategy, optimizing user experience, raising money, and selling a company.

He negotiated to have it reduced to $2.125 million and had repaid it by February 2005.

Entrepreneur Evan Williams had started a microblogging service called Twttr in 2006, and asked Sacca if he wanted to invest.

Sacca invested $25,000 and began using the service, registering in July 2006 as the 102nd user on the site.

He related to Forbes that "I wasted months trying to get others to believe it could be a real business, not just a toy," before deciding "to just buy it all myself."

His first angel investment was in Photobucket, which was then sold to News Corp in 2007.

His second investment was in Twitter.

Sacca took part in a $5 million financing round for Twitter in late 2007 and ultimately created four separate funds to surreptitiously buy as many Twitter shares as possible.

Sacca left Google in December 2007 after he had fully vested and sought additional opportunities to work with early-stage companies.

Sacca has stated that a turning point in his angel investing was in 2007, when he moved to the town of Truckee in the mountains close to Lake Tahoe.

Entrepreneurs including Travis Kalanick and Sacca would spend hours discussing ideas at the residence, and Sacca eventually bought the house next door to host various visiting entrepreneurs.

Between 2015 and 2020, he appeared as a "Guest Shark" on ABC's Shark Tank.

He is the proprietor of Lowercase Capital, a venture capital fund in the United States that has invested in seed and early-stage technology companies such as Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter, investments that resulted in his placement as No. 2 on Forbes' Midas List: Top Tech Investors for 2017.

Sacca held several positions at Google Inc., where he led the alternative access and wireless divisions and worked on mergers and acquisitions.

In early 2017, Sacca announced that he was retiring from venture investing.

In 2021, Sacca announced that he was back into venture investing with a focus on Climate issues.