Owen Davis

Owen is a General Partner at Contour Venture Partners and previously from 2008 to 2016 was the Managing Director of NYC Seed, a very early seed stage venture capital fund in New York City.  He also founded the NYC Seedstart accelerator and Overlap, an artificial intelligence software company for scheduling.   

Owen has worked in all aspects of the online world, including work with early versions of dial up services.  He created one of the first 200 web sites on-line and founded Thinking Media, an online marketing firm which pioneered online tracking of pages and advertisements.  He co-founded Sonata in 1999, a venture backed wireless company that provided location-based services and marketing to cell phones.  Owen also co-founded, Petal Computing, a firm that developed software which allowed large numbers of commodity PCs to act like a single unit and was a precursor to cloud computing. 

Owen is the author of various patents in Internet methods and technologies.  He is also the author of the book Instant Java Applets, available from Ziff-Davis Press. He is an original member of the World Wide Web Artists Consortium, and served on that group's original board.  He was also an original member of the Board setting online advertising and media specifications and has served as Managing Director of the Wireless Advertising Association.  Owen was named various times as one of the 100 Top Internet Executives in New York by The Silicon Alley Reporter and has also been named one of the 100 most influential people in Silicon Alley by Business Insider. 

Owen received an MBA from Columbia Business School and bachelor's degree from Brown University.  He is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School and a past adjunct professor of engineering at New York University in New York City and Abu Dhabi.