Howard Hartenbaum joined August Capital in 2008. Prior to joining, he served as a General Partner at Draper Richards LP where he was the founding investor in Skype and a former member of the board of directors where his achievement resulted in his joining the Forbes Midas List of top venture capitalists.
Before entering the venture capital field, Howard was at Hughes Electronics, where he was responsible for supporting business development, marketing and sales of satellite, information security and automotive technologies developed by HRL Laboratories. He also worked in engineering positions in ergonomics and user experience at Honda Motor Company and manufacturing at Teledyne Relays. Howard has worked overseas for a total of ten years in Luxembourg and Japan.
Howard received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from M.I.T.
Current August investments: Hitch, Reelgood, Reputation.com, Samba TV and Turo.
Previous August investments: Callisto Media (acquired by Penguin Random House), DITTO (acquired by 1800 Contacts), DocSend (acquired by Dropbox) and OrderAhead (acquired by Square)
Other Previous investments: Skype (acquired by eBay), Photobucket (acquired by Fox Interactive Media), Bebo (acquired by AOL), Netkraft (acquired by Adea Solutions), PowerReviews (acquired by Bazaarvoice), DimDim (acquired by Salesforce.com) and Flurry (acquired by Yahoo!).
If you’d like to contact Howard, please get an introduction from a mutual contact. Howard does not respond to cold emails.
Select Active Investments
Industry Sector: Consumer
Headquartered: Austin, TX
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartnbaum
Hitch Technologies: Connecting drivers and riders headed to the same city. Every year, there are billions of empty car seats going between cities, leading to congestion and pollution. We’re building the world’s strongest community of travelers to help solve this problem and make travel more human and pleasant.
Industry Sector: Media
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
MyFlickList (dba Reelgood): Reelgood is the complete guide to online streaming content, with the ability to track and play content across 250+ streaming source..
Industry Sector: Software and Services
Headquartered: Redwood City, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Reputation.com: Reputation.com is the world’s leading provider of online reputation products and services.
We believe that controlling your online reputation and private data is key to success in our digital world. Let us help you take control.
Industry Sector: Software and Services
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum/David Marquardt
Samba TV: Samba TV is a leading provider of television analytics and cross screen advertising. We make TV better.
We started Samba TV in 2008 with one goal: To improve the TV experience for the people who watch, broadcast and advertise on TV.
Our team has deep experience in digital media, algorithms, large-scale Web engineering, big data & design.
At Samba TV, we work together to make television the best it can be.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Turo (RelayRides): It’s taken six years, hundreds of thousands of trips, and millions of miles to arrive here at Turo. Our marketplace has blossomed into something truly extraordinary — a vibrant community of car owners and travelers who inspire and fuel us every day.
Select Exited Investments
Industry Sector: Software and Services
Headquartered: San Mateo, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Beckon (Acquired by Aclate): Beckon is performance management for marketing in all its modern complexity. Only Beckon brings together data management, planning, reporting and analytics in a simple, powerful, SaaS platform built by marketers, for marketers. It aggregates, normalizes, categorizes and analyzes all the data that matters to marketers and gives the world’s best brands rich dashboards for insight into what’s working best across it all.
Industry Sector: Software and Services
Headquartered: Palo Alto, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum/David Marquardt
Bubbli (Aria Glassworks) (Acquired by DropBox): Terrence invented the first seamless digital spherical photo in 1991, three years before the release of QTVR. In 2009, Ben created Yelp Monocle, the first Augmented Reality (AR) app to launch on the US App Store. After meeting at Stanford, Terrence proposed combining AR with spherical photographs to create an immersive ‘bubble’ viewer on the soon to be launched iPad.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: Emeryville, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Callisto Media: Callisto Media represents a new publishing paradigm: one which combines rich data analysis with deep publishing expertise. Callisto has worldwide distribution under its subsidiary Arcas Publishing and a family of imprints that includes Rockridge Press, Garamond Press, Salinas Press, Healdsburg Press, Althea Press, and others.
Industry Sector: Software and Services
Headquartered: Oakland, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Ditto: (acquired by 1800 Contacts) DITTO sits at the intersection of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, computer vision, retail, and fashion. DITTO licenses its omnichannel virtual try-on, facial analysis and frame recommendation technology platform to the world’s best eyewear retailers.
Industry Sector: Enterprise Software
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
DocSend (acquired by DropBox): DocSend is a free service that makes documents a more effective communication tool by telling you what happens after you hit send. DocSend was founded in 2013 by Tony Cassanego, Russ Heddleston, and Dave Koslow after they realized documents could be so much more effective if they were combined with the power of the internet.
Industry Sector: Enterprise Services and Logistics
Headquartered: Palo Alto, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
EatClub: EAT Club is the largest business-focused online lunch delivery company in the US. We currently serve the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. We collaborate with the best local restaurants to provide quality and affordable meals that are prepared fresh daily. We also prepare healthy and tasty food in EAT Club’s own kitchens.
Industry Sector: Software and Services
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Gigwalk: Gigwalk was founded in 2010 with the goal of reinventing work in a mobile world. Today, we make work better by developing mobile applications that transform and improve the nature of work and the relationship between employers and employees. We help businesses more efficiently manage distributed workforces to achieve better business outcomes and we give workers greater control and flexibility, so everyone can get work done.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: Arlington, VA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Livemocha (acquired by Rosetta Stone): Livemocha is committed to creating a world in which every human being is fluent in multiple languages. As the world’s largest online language learning community, Livemocha fuses traditional learning methods with online practice and interaction with native language speakers from around the world. Livemocha delivers an unparalleled learning experience that promises conversational fluency. Since launching in 2007, the Livemocha community has grown to over 16 million members from over 195 countries, highlighting the international demand for an engaging and collaborative approach to language learning.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: Mountain View, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Luminate (acquired by Yahoo!): Luminate, Inc. is the leading image advertising and related content network, serving more than 180 million users and over 6 billion image views each month. Founded in 2008 by technologists from Netscape and LiveOps, Luminate’s platform combines computer vision, machine learning, and crowdsourcing technology to deliver the optimal Visually Targeted ads and content to images.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Memolane (acquired by HP): Memolane is your digital memory – your tool to rediscover your social life on the Internet. Memolane is a digital platform collecting and connecting your thoughts, pictures, messages and music yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Industry Sector: Software and Services
Headquartered: Mountain View, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Vivek Mehra
Mirantis: Mirantis is the pure play OpenStack company, providing all the software, services, training and support you need to run a production deployment of OpenStack at scale. We deliver all the technology, integration, training and support required for companies to succeed with production-grade open source cloud. More customers rely on Mirantis than any other company to scale out OpenStack without the compromises of vendor lock-in.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
OrderAhead (Kinetic Farm) (acquired by Square): At OrderAhead, we are rethinking the way the world shops. We believe in empowering customers and business owners through the power of high-quality software. We believe in crafting a meaningful product.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: Palo Alto, CA
Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik
RocketLawyer: Helping 20 million people. Just like you. Our laws were created to protect and empower us — as individuals, families and business owners — but many people don’t get the help they need because of costly legal fees and complexity.
At Rocket Lawyer, we want to change things by making legal services affordable, simple and available to more people than ever before. I’m proud to say that we’ve been able to build a service that millions of people rely upon. Every day we spend our time and resources making it easier for people to get the legal help they need, so they can focus on what’s really important — taking care of their families and building strong businesses.
We combine free legal documents and free legal information with access to affordable representation by licensed attorneys. With Rocket Lawyer On Call, you can create a Will for your family for free or incorporate a business free from legal fees. Then, because we know there’s no replacement for qualified counsel, local attorneys are here to help when you need more guidance. With Rocket Lawyer you never have to go it alone.
Our commitment to affordable and accessible legal services is at the heart of everything we do. Most attorneys and bar associations agree that much can and should be done to improve access to the law by reducing cost and complexity. We invite you to try our service and see why customers like Sean Reid say they’re glad to have Rocket Lawyer On Call®.
Together, we’ll make the law work for you.
Industry Sector: eCommerce
Headquartered: Mountain View, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Swoopo (exited): Swoopo is an online auction site with an alternative bidding system. – See more at: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/swoopo#sthash.COkrEYIH.dpuf
Industry Sector: SAAS
Headquartered: San Francisco, CA
Lead Investment Professional: Howard Hartenbaum
Wove Technologies (acquired by Samba TV) : Our mission: To transform business from individual companies working in isolation into communities of companies working together for mutual success. Stop going it alone.