Chris Sacca is one of the more eccentric and memorable investors in “Shark Tank” history, and his season seven and eight chemistry with fellow venture capitalist Mark Cuban was a sight to behold.
While Sacca hasn’t been on the show in several seasons, his career has continued to progress in many unique ways. He even retired and returned to venture capitalism after a brief career in acting. Understanding this unique investor is a fascinating process and well worth pursuing.
Personal History
Born in 1975, Chris Sacca has had a lengthy career as a venture capitalist, company adviser, entrepreneur, and even a lawyer.
His career has included seeding successful companies like Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter. Sacca also earned positions at Google and even started a company, Lowercase Capital, that has helped him become a successful and popular investor.
Early Life
Born in Lockport, a suburb of Buffalo, Sacca tasted success early in life. His father was a thriving attorney in the Buffalo area, while his mother was a professor at SUNY Buffalo State. Early on, his parents tried to interest the sharp young boy in many things, including science and reading. They regularly took him out of school to visit fun, exciting, and educational experiences.
As a result, Sacca has kept the early love of education that young children possess and continues to grow as a person. His early high school career was very successful, enough to earn him a spot in Georgetown University in Washington D.C. While here, he studied at The Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and even studied abroad in Ecuador, Ireland, and Spain.
Success Comes in Fits and Starts
While he graduated with a Juris Doctor cum laude in law and technology in 2000, Sacca was already starting investing early. He used student loans to start a business that, while it failed, gave him enough money to start trading on the stock market.
Amazingly, he turned his $10-20 thousand into a $12 million bank that eventually became a negative $4 million after the market crashed.
These early setbacks didn’t stop him from paying off his debt and starting a career at Fenwick & West. Here, he handled mergers, venture capital, and licensing transactions before getting laid off and eventually doing freelance work as a voice-over artist and then joining The Salinger Group. Eventually, he joined Google, where he started to make his early initial successes.
The Leap to Billionaire Status
Sacca took his Google salary and began investing in companies like Photobucket. However, his intelligent purchase of as many Twitter shares as possible boosted his bank account and helped him become a complete investor.
Founding Lowercase Capital in 2010, he started investing in companies like Uber, Instagram, and Docker. As a result, his value skyrocketed, and he became a billionaire.
Since reaching this status, Sacca has contributed to water-based charities, The Tony Hawk Foundation, and even signed The Giving Pledge. This pledge called upon people to donate the majority of their net worth to philanthropic causes. Sacca has also contributed to multiple political campaigns and is an active booster of many different movements.
Net Worth
Sacca’s savvy early investment in tech companies that took off like a rocket helped him earn a net value of $1.2 billion. There have been a few times he dropped off the billionaire list, but he continues to pop back in after making a little more money with other intelligent purchases.
A vast majority of this wealth was earned during his early investments in Twitter and Uber. These two successful risks helped Sacca leverage his money into more investments with Lowercase Capital, including several cloud software companies that have been successful.
Interestingly, Sacca claimed he was retiring from venture capital in 2017 to act, raise his kids, and host a podcast. Since then, he has come back into the investing world, partially as a way to support the environment through charitable causes. Since his retirement, he has yet to come back to “Shark Tank.”
Shark Tank Details
Chris Sacca appeared in several episodes of season seven in 2015-16 alongside people like actor Asthon Kutcher and music manager Troy Carter. During his time in this season, he developed a great rapport with Mark Cuban, and the two often went in on investments together as buyers.
Sacca returned to season eight for the 2016-17 episodes, appearing in several more with Cuban and other similar investors. It was at the end of this season that he announced his retirement from investing, which caught many by surprise. His pal Cuban was particularly saddened by this news.
While Sacca has come back to the market after stalling in his acting career, he has yet to get invited back to the show. His success on the show was fairly strong for the most part, especially with his dynamic and charismatic personality and his unique interactions with other guests.
Best/Worst Shark Tank Investments
In season seven, Chris Sacca and Mark Cuban banded together to invest in “Rent Like a Champion.” This business focused on providing inexpensive rental options for students and had a very strong business model.
The founder of the business claimed that meeting the two was like “winning the lottery,” as they invested heavily in the business and gained significant interest in the business.
Since their investment, “Rent Like a Champion” has expanded heavily and is now available in many cities across the nation. They were looking to move into the West Coast soon to focus on college-friendly towns throughout Los Angeles and San Francisco. An update on the business in season eight showed that Cuban and Sacca had made a savvy and intelligent purchase.
While none of Sacca’s investments were necessarily bad in “Shark Tank,” Brightwheel (season seven pitch) ran into some problems early on in its development.
While this school-related tech has expanded to 25,000 schools (helped by Cuban and Sacca’s $600,000 investment), its poor security protection led to complaints that affected stock prices and caused serious controversies among schools using this app.
