David Fennell

David Douglas Fennell (born December 19, 1968), is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He comes from a family of early California technology pioneers in Northern California’s semiconductor industry, Silicon Valley and Southern California’s Aerospace industry.
Fennell sought the Republican Party nomination for Lieutenant Governor of California in the 2014 primary election. He lost to Ron Nehring.
David Fennell is the founder of Media Bay Ventures (MBV) a Venture Capital firm based in Jack London Square in Oakland,California which according to the company website, focuses on, investing in the areas of mobile apps, streaming video, augmented reality, live music and real estate investments targeted at the “echo boomer” generation.
MBV states on its website that it distinguishes itself from its competing Sand Hill Road based VC funds by making it “Policy to recruit VC business partners with real world experience in international business, film, music and tech industries, as opposed to the 1990s trend of staffing California VC firms with East Coast, Wall Street investment bankers.”
In 1986 Fennell graduated from Half Moon Bay High School. He then earned a Bachelor of Science in Commerce with a Degree in Marketing from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. Fennell holds a Master of Arts in Asian Pacific Studies with an emphasis in Mandarin Chinese, which he earned at the Center for The Pacific Rim at the University of San Francisco. He later attended Vietnam National University and the Beijing Language and Culture University His Master’s thesis was "Peaceful Evolution: Mongolia's Steps Towards a Free Market Economy" based on his on-the-ground research covering 1996 Mongolian Election ending 70 years of rule by the Communist Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party. He also attended Vietnam National University and the Beijing Language and Culture University.
Fennell has lectured on the topic of applying Silicon Valley innovation approaches to international business and development at research centers including the Korean Economic Research Institute (KERI), Palais des Nations, MIT Media Lab, Asia Pacific Center for Securities Studies and National University of Mongolia.
Fennell is an Eagle Scout who completed his service project in 1984 in conjunction with the California State Parks at Dunes Beach in Half Moon Bay, CA.
EARLY YEARS
Fennell, is a second generation Silicon Valley technologist and entrepreneur of Irish, English, German, Czech descent. His immigrant ancestors migrated via wagon train to the Midwest to take up farming. Many extended family live and farm in that region today.
He comes from a large Catholic family originating in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a suburb and farming community in the Omaha Nebraska Metropolitan Area, where his father was the second of 10 children and his mother was the second of 7 children. David Fennell is the oldest cousin on both sides of a large extended Catholic family tree.
His 96 year old grandparents have been married 75 years. His grandmother was a teacher in a one room school house. His grandfather served overseas in the Navy in the European Theater during World War II and is a member of the United Association Union of Steamfitters and Plumbers Local 464. When his father was 12 his grandparents purchased a cattle and soybean farm in Council Bluffs which they still operate today.
Though children of a farming family, all of his father’s nine siblings, as well as his father, have gone into careers in science and technology, film, music and fine arts.
His Aunt, Dr. Anne Fennell was on the team that mapped the grape genome. His father Leonard Fennell was an inventor for 17 years at the legendary Research & Development Center of where Fennell spent summers with his father and used the GUI before Steve Jobs took XEROX PARC technology to help create the Macintosh in 1984. David Fennell later sold Steve Job’s NeXT Computers after graduating from college in 1992.

Since 1970, his uncle Dr. Joseph Fennell has been an aerospace scientist at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California, working as a scientist and satellite specialist on projects such as the Mars Viking Lander, CRRES, POLAR, Cluster II, and the Van Allen Radiation Storm Probes. At age 70 his uncles’s next satellite project will be launched in November, 2014 from the Kennedy Space Center. His Cousin Dr. Chris Fennell is a theoretical chemist and his Cousin Captain Zachary D. Fennell is a F-16 Fighter Pilot Instructor at Shawn Airforce Base.
Outside of innovation in tech, his family is also involved in film, art and music. Fennell’s Cousin, Zach Fennell is a classically trained opera singer, Cousin Kim Fennell is in a punk rock band based in Berkeley, California, Sean Fennell is an animator at Dreamworks Animation in Glendale, California, where he worked on films such as Shark Tale, Over the Hedge, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and Rise of the Guardians. His uncle Ed Fennell runs the fine arts center of Hot Shops in Omaha Nebraska, and his late Aunt Eileen Fennell is an alumni of the San Francisco Art Institute. His uncle Ed Fennell runs the fine arts center of Hot Shops in Omaha Nebraska, and his late Aunt Eileen Fennell is an alumni of the San Francisco Art Institute.
David Fennell’s parents are both technologists and music fans who have taken Fennell to live concerts since he was 8 years old. Fennell has been to over 500 live music concerts.
His parents met while both were enrolled in Creighton University at the BLUJ college radio station, where his physicist major father was the engineer and his chemistry major mother was the Disc Jockey. In interviews, Fennell often states that his personality reflects his genes being 50% Engineer and 50% Disc Jockey.
David Fennell and his twin sister, Denise, were born in St. Louis, Missouri in December, 1968 where Fennell’s father, Leonard Fennell was pursing his Ph.D in solid-state physics at Washington University in St. Louis. His mother, Diane Fennell was one of only six women at the Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa in a class of 300, but decided to drop out of medical school to start a family. In 1969 his father decided to follow in Fennell’s grandfather’s footsteps and join the US military at the height of the Vietnam War.
With his nuclear physics background, Leonard Fennell was recruited to California when David Fennell was an infant by the U.S. Navy to teach at the Naval Nuclear Power Training and Command Nuclear Power School at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California.
The Fennell household kitchen table served as a location where the elder Fennell would give evening tutoring to students who would later command ships in the US nuclear navy including the future commander of the .
The kitchen table also served for years as a lab bench where Fennell taught his son to solder Heathkits and build the family oscilloscope, television, and radios. The table was famously covered with burns from the use of the soldering iron. It was in these early years that Fennell learned technology products were man made, not magic, and could be learned and built. Steve Jobs built the same Heathkits in the 1970s and cited them as the basis of his knowledge of modern technology.

After the Vietnam War, Fennell’s father and other Veterans were subjected to the anti-Veteran assaults and biases in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Texas Instruments semiconductor team that had been formed under the guidance of Jack Kilby, the inventor of the integrated circuit, handheld calculator and thermal printing, was actively recruiting veterans, so the Fennell family moved to Texas to work for the company. His mother was also recruited and worked as an engineer on the chips for the Speak & Spell and various military products including MX missiles.
In Texas elementary school, Fennell scored the highest in the district on an aptitude test after which the Superintendent of the school asked his parents to allow him to skip a grade.
He later was selected to be part of a Hamilton Park Pacesetter Magnet School as part of a Texas desegregation busing program. The elementary school in Hamilton Park, Dallas had been an all black school until 1975, when it was turned into a magnet school, where the top teachers and top white students were recruited and bused into the school to improve racial diversity. Fennell sang in the school’s gospel choir, learned to breakdance and became a lifelong fan of funk music. “As a child, it seemed completely normal, but when we moved from Texas to the farming and fishing town of Half Moon Bay, California, I realized I was the only kid that owned Commodores albums and knew who George Clinton was. The surfers did not know what to make of me.”
In the late 1970s his parents were recruited back to California to work in a fruit farming and canning area that would become know as Silicon Valley. His parents moved to the farming and fishing community of Half Moon Bay, California, in San Mateo County, they commuted one hour each way to Silicon Valley. This allowed David to be raised in a farming and beach community on the San Mateo Coast-side, where he became an Eagle Scout and an avid outdoorsman.
David spent his summers with his father at XEROX PARC, where he used the computer mouse, computer screen icons and the Internet on a Xerox Star computer long before Steve Jobs launched Macintosh with their famous 1984 commercial, and 16 years before Bill Gates announced Windows 98.
His mother was initially an Engineer at companies such as Phillips Semiconductor but later went into Marketing for semiconductor capital equipment manufacturers including high tech, sophisticated multimillion dollar equipment used to produce semiconductor chips. This equipment included equipment and Plasma Etch equipment produced by Applied Materials and Lam Research and sold to manufacturers such as Intel, AMD & Motorola.
Seeing the extremely talented and hard working XEROX PARC team invent all the basics of modern computing while at the same time watching Steve Jobs with his marketing knowledge make millions from their inventions, David decided to switch his college major from science and engineering to Science in Commerce with a degree in Marketing. Another deciding factor in his college direction was a visit to Altamont Pass Windmill Farm in 1985, his senior year in high school, when he was applying for the Westinghouse Talent Search. Fennel was invited to a meeting at the Altamont Wind Farm with scientists and business investors. It became clear the business investors could not understand the scientists, and the scientists could not understand the business investors. “They might have well been speaking two different languages. But at 16 years old I could understand both. I immediately dropped the idea of a science degree and took an evening business night class at the College of San Mateo and to pursue a degree in business and interviewed the marketing reps and my parents work to ask where to get an undergraduate Marketing Degree. Most schools did not have a Marketing program, but everyone told me to go to Santa Clara University because it had a great program, and was a Catholic Jesuit school in the heart of Silicon Valley.”
During the 1980s, as a young teen Fennell had already received a business license to sell modems and other computer equipment to his friends and used this as his application essay for his admissions to the Marketing Program at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.
While at Santa Clara, Fennell was a Resident Assistant (RA) in Swig Hall and worked evenings and weekends at Stanford University Bookstore. He also worked as a holiday package courier at United Parcel Service.
On Black Monday, October 19, 1987 when the stock market crashed he realized that Wall Street analysts did not realize that Semiconductor manufacturing companies were being valued at a fraction of the value of the orders that had already been placed by companies such as Intel. He put all of his summer earnings into these companies and made exponential gains when the market bounced back. It was Fennell’s first and last stock market trade and began his distrust of analysts evaluating tech and industries they did not understand in a state they never visited.
Fennell did an internship at the information technology research and advisory company Dataquest and wrote analytical reports on National Semiconductor. He saw disturbing data in the Dataquest files discussing tech jobs being shipped out of Silicon Valley to Asia.
When the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 occurred the conventional wisdom at the time was that China would again be closed to the world. Fennell did not agree and reacted the opposite of the then conventional wisdom and enrolled in a Mandarin Chinese class and began to focus his career and studies on China and Asia. His father at XEROX PARC was at that time put in charge of setting up tech labs in Japan for partners at Fuji Xerox and was flying back and forth to Japan on a regular basis. He convinced his father to use his extra frequently flyer miles to travel around Asia during his summers backpacking, living on dollars a day, traveling solo to remote areas, including stays with Muslim villagers in the Thar Desert. These experiences and his study of Chinese lead to his career in International Business.

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