Chicago Booth Alumni Spotlight: David Lawee, Google

David Lawee, Canadian born entrepreneur and current Vice President of Corporate Development at Google, is a business titan the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago is surely proud to call an alum.

Early Career and Education

David Lawee had a diverse range of educational experiences before going on to earn his MBA at Chicago Booth, beginning with an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Western Ontario and followed by a law degree from the McGill University Faculty of Law.

Before beginning his long tenure at Google, Lawee founded Xfire, a successful online gaming community acquired in 2006 by Viacom for $108 million. Even before Xfire, however, Lawee was no stranger to entrepreneurial ventures, co-founding three start-ups, among them Toronto-based venture capital firm Mosaic Venture Partners.

Two years after Viacom’s acquisition of Xfire, Lawee took over the role of Vice President of Corporate Development at Google. The spot had been left open after the former VP, Salman Ullah, had left the company to form a new venture fund, Merus Capital.

Before his appointment to his current position, Lawee had already demonstrated a commitment to success at Google. Beginning in corporate development, Lawee moved on to a new role as Google’s first Vice President of Marketing, managing all of the company’s consumer, partner and advertiser marketing across the globe. During Lawee’s time at Google, more than 100 companies have been acquired.

According to Lawee, two thirds of these acquisitions have found success—a number unprecedented in a tech world which typically consists of success rates much lower than even 50 percent.

CapitalG

In 2013, David Lawee founded CapitalG, then known as Google Capital. Along with partners Laela Sturdy, (a former Google Director of Sales & Business Operations), Gretchen Howard (former Google Managing Director of Sales & Business Operations) and Gene Frantz (former TPG partner), Lawee founded CapitalG for investing in growth stage startups.

CapitalG focuses specifically on investing in late stage startups with a profit-driven—rather than strategy-driven—investment plan. In addition to investing capital, Lawee’s company offers portfolio companies the opportunity to access Google’s resources and network, connecting them with such leading figures as David Drummond, Alphabet’s SVP and CapitalG Chairman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The group officially became CapitalG in November of 2016, just a year after a restructuring of the company that made CapitalG a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a new umbrella company from Google. Since its inception in 2013, CapitalG has invested in 25 companies across a range of industries, from security to e-learning to financial technology.

In a 2012 Business Insider interview, Lawee offered suggestions for startups looking to be acquired by Google—from experience gained in over ten years with the company, but also undoubtedly stemming from the strong business education gained at Chicago Booth. Most importantly, he emphasized that companies hoping to be acquired by Google should have a vision which matches that of Google—either actively working towards a problem Google needs solved or by creating a product that will benefit and can benefit from Google’s resources.

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