As 500 Startups enters its seventh year, I’d like to welcome an old friend and ex-PayPal colleague to the team, Aman Verjee, who is joining us as COO and will also be joining the 500 Startups management team. I’ve known Aman for over a decade and aside from some really bad puns and questionable sartorial decisions, he’s a pretty awesome person.

Aman has over fifteen years of operating experience in both public and private technology companies including PayPal, eBay, Sonos, Collective, and CAN Capital. Over the years he’s helped raise nearly a billion dollars from top VC and PE firms such as Accel, Greycroft, and KKR, and banks such as Morgan Stanley, SunTrust, Wells Fargo, UBS, JPMorgan and Barclays. For the past two years Aman was CFO at CAN Capital, an alternative finance platform that has provided billions of dollars in lending for small business. Before that, he was the CFO of Collective, Inc., an ad tech platform in New York; while there, he guided them from $100 million in revenue to over $175 million in revenue, while generating double digit profit margins. Aman led all of their public company readiness efforts and led Collective through an S-1 filing.

Before that, Aman spent nine years at PayPal and eBay doing financial planning and analysis, customer analytics and strategy, and helped build PayPal into a leader in payment processing and financial services. Earlier in his career he also held positions at Lehman and McKinsey. Aman graduated from Stanford with an undergraduate degree in economics, and a JD in law from Harvard. Aman was born in Nairobi, Kenya; grew up in Toronto, Canada, and is married with two wonderful little girls.

The role of COO will be an important one at 500 as we prepare the company for future growth and scale, continue to raise capital for our global funds and regional & vertical microfunds, and also monitor our top-performing companies as they grow. We look forward to Aman helping take 500 to the next stage of growth… to Infinity and Beyond!