| Website | PennyBlack.vc |
| Georgetown University, BA | 2006 |
| Columbia University, Post Graduate Study | |
| Corporate Finance & Financial Accounting |
Passionate & chronically curious early stage investor.
Eliot Durbin is Managing Director & co-founder of Penny Black, a New York based firm investing in young endeavors across a spectrum of sectors including consumer, mobile, enterprise, financial, healthcare, and media technology.
He’s an active partner of seed technology fund BOLDstart Ventures (with Ed Sim); and Eighteen Forty, a new media focused investment fund (with IM Global Films).
Eliot’s investments include Anchor Intelligence (sold to Comscore), Spinback (acquired by Buddy Media), Blaze.io (acquired by Akamai), DoodleDeals (sold to PlumDistrict), Rapportive, Klout, IndieGoGo, Yipit, Prescreen, and Enterproid. He’s also a director/advisor to Numberfire, Medpricer, Equipois, Bare Fruit, Sundia, DoubleBeam, & nonprofit YouInspire.org.
Prior to Penny Black, Eliot founded Templates.com, an online software retailer that was acquired 2002. He subsequently worked at the Permal Group, a multi-billion dollar global fund of hedge funds (acquired by Legg Mason in 2006). Eliot is a graduate of Georgetown University with post-graduate study at Columbia University. He enjoys surfing and lives in NYC.
Favorite Quote;
“The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in everything he does, leaving others to determine whether he is at work or at play. To him, he is always doing both.” – Zen Buddhist Text
| Company | Date | Round | Size | Participants |
| Yipit | 4/10 | Seed | $250k | 4 |
