Before writing his first term sheet, Daniel Karp was designing ASICs. Before designing chips, he was a signals intelligence analyst in the Israeli Defense Forces' Unit 8200 - the military program that has produced more startup founders per capita than arguably any other institution on earth. That background isn't decorative. It shapes exactly how Karp evaluates technical bets.
After the IDF, Karp took the engineering route: a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, four years building hardware at Comsys Communication and Signal Processing - a company that Intel would later acquire. A brief stint at a financial VC followed, then an MBA from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business in finance, strategic management, and entrepreneurship. By the time he graduated, he had the rarest possible credential in venture: he had actually built the things he would be asked to fund.
Microsoft came next. Three years across roles in strategy and business development with the Azure team and the Startup Business Group inside Microsoft Research - an incubation arm that worked on natural user interfaces, robotics, 3D printing, and early machine learning applications. Karp was embedded in the beginning of the cloud era before most people knew "the cloud" was a thing. He understood infrastructure from the substrate up.
Then Cisco, in 2013. Eight years leading investments and acquisitions across some of the company's most consequential domains - networking, cloud and data centers - with geographic responsibility for two of the world's most technically active regions: Israel and Latin America. He co-invested in funds including Team8 and KaszeK, the Latin America regional venture platform, bringing an unusual continental range to a role most people focused on a single geography.