Rich LeFurgy has been a board member, advisor or investor in over 55 online advertising companies, drawing from over a 30 year career in advertising. LeFurgy was Founding Chairman of the IAB and sfBIG, a Venture Capitalist (WaldenVC), head of ad sales at Starwave (ESPN.com) and the Walt Disney Internet Group. Prior to Starwave, LeFurgy had a 17 year career at traditional ad agency NWAyer in New York, working on clients AT&T, Proctor & Gamble, Avon, Gillette and Dupont, among others.
He started online advertising business accelerator Archer in 2004, helping early stage online advertising companies reach takeoff velocity with strategic advisory services in fundraising, trade marketing and sales. LeFurgy received ad:tech’s Industry Achievement Award (2008), the IAB’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), was inducted into Advertising Age’s Interactive Hall of Fame (2000). He was recognized by USA Today as the “Johnny Appleseed of online advertising”.
LeFurgy has served on company boards as a director, including Blue Lithium and Associated Content (both sold to Yahoo!) and Web Clients (sold to ValueClick), and is currently on the board of Placecast. He has also provided advisory services to large and small online advertising companies (Google, AOL, Blue Lithium, Glam, and Placecast) and has personally invested in a number of promising online advertising startups, such as Klout, Ad Relevance (sold to Nielsen NetRatings), Grouper/Crackle (sold to Sony) and Blue Lithium (sold to Yahoo!), among others.