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Owen Davis

  • Lecturer in Law

Owen Davis is currently a Partner at Contour Venture Partners, a early-stage, technology focused venture capital fund based in New York City. He is the past Managing Director of NYC Seed, a 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 AOL and MSN. He created one of the first 200 websites 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 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. 

He received his bachelor's degree from Brown University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. 

He sits on various Boards of Directors, including the Farrell Foundation for PTSD. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, Fu School of Engineering and Columbia Law School and was a past adjunct professor of engineering at New York University in New York City and Abu Dhabi.