From a young age, Jonathan Golden learned hard lessons about investing.
In 1999, dot-com retailer eToys went public in a splashy IPO, and the shares more than tripled the first day.
Golden, who grew up in Detroit, was 16 then. He invested in the eToys offering through a custodian E-Trade account his parents had set up.
He was a fan of CNBC, watching business journalist Maria Bartiromo cover the markets, and subscribed to Red Herring. Golden wrote in a Medium blog post that he’d hung Apple’s “Think Different” ad posters on every wall in his bedroom.
Of course, eToys flamed out and went bankrupt a couple of years later. “I lost it all,” he says.
But it’s safe to say the failed stock investment didn’t dissuade Golden, now 34, from becoming part of the tech and venture communities.
In June, Golden, a tech operator and angel investor for the past several years, joined New Enterprise Associates as a partner to focus on consumer technology.
Specifically, Golden says, he’s looking at marketplaces, such as the transportation and real estate sectors, as well as other large consumer categories.
As an angel investor, Golden said he’d made small bets in numerous early-stage companies, including Bowery Farming, Coinbase, Everlane, Funding Circle and Tile, among others.
“What I was always told about investing is that you have to look at 30 companies to make one good investment,” Golden says. “But it’s not one in 30. It’s much higher than that.”
Golden said that in meeting with the NEA partners, he felt a connection: “I was impressed with how they approach investing and how they treat their entrepreneurs.”
Working out of NEA’s South Park office in San Francisco, Golden said he hasn’t yet made an investment at NEA, but he’s meeting with a number of startups.
Prior to NEA, he served as director of product at Airbnb, joining the company in 2011 when it had about 35 employees. He said he built the company’s payments structure and helped scale Airbnb 100x over six years.
Before that, he had product-related stints at Hubspot and Dropbox and was a venture investor at Greylock Partners.
He also co-founded StartX, a nonprofit that helps accelerate entrepreneurs, while attending Stanford University, where he received an MBA.
Golden said he expects a number of venture investors to come out of Airbnb. It’s only natural, he said, considering the transformative nature of the tech.
In the same way that using credit cards online was frowned upon but is commonplace now, renting your home or renting someone else’s home through a website platform like Airbnb was initially difficult.
“Psychologically, people had knee-jerk reactions against it at first,” he said. “But we saw the explosive opportunity. And that kind of thinking plays well in venture capital.”
He said he got his job at Airbnb after tracking the company for a couple of years and sending the co-founders a cold email to introduce himself. He was not an angel investor in Airbnb.
Similarly, his method of reaching out as a VC is through cold emails in which he messages founders, introduces himself and says he’d like to talk more about their companies.
“It helps to say, ‘Hi. I’m from NEA’ in the subject line of the emails,” he jokes.
