| David Friedberg | |
| Birth Date: | June 6, 1980 |
| Birth Place: | South Africa |
| Citizenship: | South African, American |
| Alma Mater: | University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation: | Entrepreneur, businessman, angel investor |
David Albert Friedberg (born 1980) is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and angel investor.[1] He founded and was chief executive of The Climate Corporation, whose $1.1 billion sale to Monsanto in 2013 made it the first unicorn in the emerging agricultural technology space.[2] [3] He is founder and CEO of The Production Board (TPB). He is a co-host of the All-In podcast, alongside David Sacks, Jason Calacanis & Chamath Palihapitiya. Spanning his career, he has contributed to 32 patents.[4]
Friedberg was born in South Africa. At age six, Friedberg moved with his family to Los Angeles, California.[5] In high school, Friedberg was president of the environmental club "Students H.O.P.E." (Students Healing Our Planet Earth).[6] At age 16, he entered Clarkson University, in Potsdam, New York, where he worked in a pool hall and learned to play poker.[7] After one year in upstate New York, he transferred to University of California, Berkeley, where he had a part-time job doing mathematical modeling at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and received a bachelor's degree in astrophysics in 2001.[8]
After several years in investment banking and private equity, Friedberg joined Google in March 2004 as one of the first 1,000 employees and a founding member of Google's Corporate Development group.[9] As Corporate Development and Business Product Manager, Friedberg helped run Google's online advertising platform, AdWords, and negotiated acquisitions and worked with Google co-founder Larry Page.[10]
In 2006, he founded his first company, WeatherBill, to create and buy custom weather insurance online. Friedberg was still working at Google as a business product manager when the idea for the company came to him.[11] He was driving past the Bike Hut in San Francisco and seeing sales slump on rainy days[12] as the thought occurred to him that the impact of weather on a business must be a big problem.
WeatherBill secured funding from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Index Ventures and Atomico.[13] In 2011, Friedberg changed WeatherBill's name to The Climate Corporation.[14] The Climate Corporation focused on offering farmers weather insurance and the climate.com service to help them track, analyze, and make field-specific decisions on their farms to improve farming outcomes. On 5 October 2011, Friedberg gave his Entrepreneurship Gives Life Meaning lecture[15] at Stanford.
In October 2013, Monsanto announced that it was acquiring The Climate Corporation for about $1.1 billion.[16] Friedberg joined Monsanto's Executive Team after the acquisition and in 2016 shifted to an advisory role.[17]
In 2016, Friedberg began talking with Larry Page about a way to build and finance more startups focused on food, agriculture, decarbonization and life sciences.[18] Through parent company Alphabet, Page agreed to help finance a holding company that Friedberg would operate.[19] Friedberg founded The Production Board (TPB) in 2016.[20]
TPB partners with scientists, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs to solve the world's challenges, such as climate change.[21] TPB portfolio businesses include Pattern Ag, Ohalo, Culture Biosciences, Triplebar Bio, Supergut and Cana.[18] In July 2021, Friedberg announced that The Production Board raised $300 million from Alphabet, Baillie Gifford, Allen & Co., BlackRock, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global.[18]
Friedberg founded car insurance firm Metromile in 2011 and was its chairman during its early years.[22] [23] He is also an angel investor in various technology, food, agriculture, and life sciences startups. In 2014, he purchased Canadian quinoa supplier NorQuin, North America's largest supplier of quinoa.[24] In 2022, Above Food Corp. acquired Norquin[25] and appointed Friedberg to its Innovation Advisory Council.[26]
Friedberg is one of the four co-hosts of All-In, a business and investment podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, David O. Sacks, and Jason Calacanis.[27]
Friedberg is a lifelong vegetarian.[6]