Dave McClure and Dave Richards Join Unitus Board of Directors
The Two New Board Members Will Help Unitus Alleviate Global Poverty
Redmond, Wash.—January 18, 2006—Unitus, a leading microfinance organization, announced today that Dave McClure and Dave Richards, two senior business executives committed to addressing the problem of global poverty, joined the Unitus Board of Directors.
Unitus is a global microfinance accelerator which identifies and partners with the highest-potential microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the world. By providing capital assistance and consulting services, Unitus grows its MFI partners so that they can serve exponentially more poor clients. Currently Unitus has seven MFI partners serving more than 540,000 clients in India, Kenya and Mexico.
The Unitus Board of Directors is comprised of highly accomplished, business-minded professionals with expertise in finance, venture capital and management. They contribute their time, resources and knowledge to support the Unitus mission of decreasing global poverty by increasing access to microfinance. In addition to playing a key role in selecting Unitus’s new MFI partners, Board members ensure Unitus’s internal efficiency and effectiveness.
“Dave McClure and Dave Richards are a fantastic addition to the Unitus Board of Directors,” said Geoff Davis, Unitus president and CEO. “They share our view that increasing access to microfinance is one of the best ways to alleviate poverty worldwide. Moreover, their innovative, high-growth technology industry experience gives them a keen understanding of the challenges facing our MFI partners.”
Dave McClure has worked in the high-tech industry for over fifteen years. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1988, Dave was a programmer and database consultant with several Silicon Valley companies, including Intel and Microsoft. In 1994, Dave started Aslan Computing, an Internet and e-commerce consulting firm, which was later acquired by Servinet / Panurgy in 1998. Since 1999 he has been an advisor to and investor in several startups including Feedster (www.feedster.com), HealthUnity, WellFund, and SimplyHired.
From 2001 to 2004, Dave was director of marketing at PayPal (www.paypal.com), a division of eBay, where he created and managed the PayPal Developer Network program. In 2005 Dave joined SimplyHired.com as director of marketing, and is now VP of evangelism. SimplyHired.com (www.SimplyHired.com) is a “vertical search” startup which runs the world’s largest search engine for jobs. SimplyHired was named by Time Magazine as one of the Top 50 Coolest Web sites for 2005. Dave is also founder and co-chair for the SDForum Search SIG (www.searchsig.wordpress.com), a technology user group covering emerging topics in the internet search industry.
Dave is an enthusiastic believer in microfinance as a means of reducing global poverty and is actively engaged in promoting microfinance awareness and involvement through the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network (www.svmn.wordpress.com). He is also a member of the Full Circle Fund (www.fullcirclefund.org), a San Francisco-based non-profit formed by San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneurs and business leaders to address local community issues in affordable housing, education, and technology access.
Dave Richards is high-tech business leader and passionate volunteer for a number of nonprofit organizations. On the business front, Dave has led many high-performance technology and business teams including his most recent role as a business unit executive with RealNetworks. Prior to Real, Dave held management positions with Sybase and Symantec, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently, Dave is a principal with Fast Forward Consulting Services (www.ff-cs.com), providing management consulting services to high-tech companies.
On the nonprofit front, Dave serves as a board member with Mutual Interest (www.mutualinterest.org), which provides security deposits to homeless families moving into permanent housing, Off The Map (co-founder and chairperson–www.off-the-map.org) and Vineyard Community Church—a faith-based organization which provides social services to local low-income families.
Dave is very interested in the power of economics to break cycles of poverty with particular hope for well-implemented microcredit systems. He has a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of British Columbia with a major in finance and minor in computer science.
About Unitus (www.unitus.com):
Unitus is a global microfinance accelerator that acts as a social venture capital investor for the microfinance industry. Unitus identifies the highest-potential microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing countries and helps accelerate their growth through capital investments and capacity-building consulting, thus empowering them to help exponentially more poor people worldwide. In doing so, Unitus aims to demonstrate that MFIs can be run as profitable, large-scale, poverty-focused businesses with links to local capital markets. As of December 2005, Unitus had seven MFI partners worldwide serving more than 540,000 poor clients. Based in Redmond, Wash., USA, and with an office in Bangalore, India, Unitus relies on innovative financial instruments, and the financial resources of like-minded individuals and foundations, to fulfill its mission. Unitus received the 2006 Fast Company / Monitor Group Social Capitalist Award for taking an innovative, entrepreneurial, business-minded approach to alleviating global poverty. For more information about Unitus, please visit:www.unitus.com