Talk Title: Building a Purpose Driven Business

Dave Whorton founded Tugboat Institute in 2013 as a membership organization for purpose-driven leaders of successful privately held businesses. He coined the term “Evergreen businesses” and “Evergreen 7Ps” to describe the defining characteristics of these companies. Tugboat includes as members first generation entrepreneurs, family owned businesses, and employee-owned businesses.

Dave is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist by background. He worked at Hewlett Packard in high school and college and has co-founded four companies, including Good Technology, Inc. and Drugstore.com. He has worked as a consultant at Bain & Co, a global strategic consulting firm, and as an associate partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and a managing director and partner of TPG Ventures, the venture capital arm of Texas Pacific Group. At those firms, he led investments and worked closely with the founders of Amazon, Google, Autotrader, Successfactors and Blue Nile, among others, in their early days. He earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford. Dave is home-based in Sun Valley, Idaho, married and has two children.