Sean O'Sullivan

Sean O'Sullivan General Information

Description

Mr. Sean O'Sullivan is the Founder & serevs as Managing General Partner at SOSV. Mr. O'Sullivan serves as Board Member at Prellis Biologics. He serves on Investment Advisory Board at AIF. He also serves as a Board member at Sun Genomics. He is a Co-Founding Limited Partner and also serves as Investment Advisor at Autism Impact Fund. After his first startup went public in 1994, he founded SOSV in 1995 as a "super angel." In 2007, based on the success of two dozen investments that had done remarkably well, he began expanding SOSV and transitioning it from a personal investment vehicle into an organization that today has about 100 staff supporting investments into 70 new startups every year, as well as follow-on investments in another 200 or so SOSV startups. In 2023, SOSV had 8 general partners operating globally with major offices in San Francisco, New York, Cork, Newark, Pune, and Shenzhen. The company also has staff in over 10 US states; Tokyo, Japan; Singapore; and London, UK. He got his entrepreneurial start in 1985 as a founder of MapInfo, inventing street mapping technology for personal computers. MapInfo went on to become a $200 million revenue public company with over 1,000 employees worldwide. In 1996, while at the helm of his second company, NetCentric, he created "software for inside the Internet" and is credited with co-creating the term "cloud computing" alongside George Favaloro from Compaq. He continued as an entrepreneur and investor, creating and supporting a range of business, humanitarian, and educational endeavors. A major promoter of economic and social development, he founded JumpStart International in 2003. JumpStart was a leading humanitarian engineering organization based in Baghdad and which operated throughout Iraq during the post-war period of 2003-2006. He spent a few years running JumpStart, which for a time had a staff of more than 3,000, running up to 80 projects at a time in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Najaf. As the benefactor of the O'Sullivan Foundation, he has also been a primary funder of organizations such as Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org), I-ASC (http://i-asc.org/), and CoderDojo (http://coderdojo.com). As the founding Chairman of the Irish Entrepreneurship Forum and founder of Open Ireland, he was a leader and influencer of Irish government policy in fueling economic growth and recovery in the technology sector. He was a regular investment panelist on the popular RTÉ TV show Dragon's Den and an occasional columnist for Ireland's Sunday Business Post. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from the University of Southern California.