Dave McClure

McClure ran marketing at PayPal before Web 2.0, then angel-invested in Mint and SlideShare — and kept watching portfolio dashboards celebrate numbers that couldn't fall. His 'Startup Metrics for Pirates' talk distilled the fix into five letters, and 500 Startups later drilled the funnel into hundreds of accelerator cohorts, which is how a conference slide deck became the default vocabulary of startup growth.

McClure gave startup growth its funnel vocabulary in one profane, brilliant conference deck: 'Startup Metrics for Pirates' reduced every consumer business to five stages — AARRR — and insisted founders pick one honest metric per stage. As founder of 500 Startups he ran the thesis at portfolio scale, spraying small checks across hundreds of companies worldwide (including early bets in emerging markets long before it was fashionable) and teaching a generation of accelerator founders to argue about activation and retention instead of press coverage.