DH

David Haywood Smith

Lead QA at SportPursuit

Hexham, England

Overview 

David Haywood Smith is a seasoned entrepreneur and investor with a background in web development, e-commerce, and digital marketing. Currently working at SportPursuit as Lead QA, he has successfully invested in a range of companies like Seedrs, Citymapper, and Monzo, showcasing his expertise in identifying and supporting promising startups. Highlights of David's career include founding Luna Submarine and making strategic investments in companies across various sectors like Direct-to-Consumer, AR/VR, and AI, demonstrating his diverse skill set and keen eye for emerging trends in the market.

Work Experience 

S

SportPursuit

  • Lead QA

    2012 - Current

    First hire by CTO after raising Series A. Started as junior developer, now part of the tech management team and Lead QA. Epic adventure from 10 to 300+ employees and still loving it! 🏔

Luna Submarine

  • Founder

    2005

    Primarily social shopping concept wishli.st. Conceived in 2005. Built first version myself - it was beautiful! Launched May 2007. Raised pre-seed funding March 2008. Relaunched with professional help June 2008. Relaunched as a Facebook app December 2009. First cohort of The Difference Engine accelerator March-May 2010. Used as holding company for various side hustles since.

G

GoCardless

  • Developer

    2012 - 2012

    Short-term contract to build the first PHP client library for the GoCardless API. Company consisted of only founders and first employee. Awesome energy. Alas long-term they needed experienced Ruby devs!

Multimap

  • Intern

    2003 - 2003

    Work experience at age 16; met founder at an event and requested a placement; introduced to all depts; built an internal on-call rota that showed profile pictures to the whole office; PHP/MySQL.

PM

Presence Multimedia

  • Intern

    2001 - 2001

    Work experience at age 14; cold outreach to web design agencies in Newcastle and arranged two weeks with Presence; first experience of broadband (stream a movie trailer!); made useful contributions to multiple client projects; HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Education 

Investments 

Seedrs

Equity Crowdfunding

Total funding: $12M

Picfair

Venture Round

Total funding: $2.5M

SimplyCook

Venture Round

Total funding: $4M

Crowdcube

Equity Crowdfunding

Total funding: $64M

Articles About David

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