Buck Goldstein

Mr. Goldstein graduated from UNC in 1970 with a degree in political science. While Mr. Goldstein was here he helped found the Experimental College which was the precursor of the First Year Seminar Program. Mr. Goldstein was also the campus coordinator of the Moratorium Against the War in Vietnam. He convinced over 25,000 people to join in a peaceful protest march and rally that was the largest ever to be held on campus (before or since).

After Mr. Goldstein graduated, he did a number of things including directing the urban internship program at Yale and serving as co-director of Operation Switchboard, a 24 hour youth counseling center in Chapel Hill. In 1974 Mr. Goldstein began law school at UNC and after graduation he went to work for a traditional corporate law firm. Mr. Goldstein worked at the firm for four years and his last assignment was a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Goldstein resigned from the firm in 1981.

In 1982, Mr. Goldstein co-founded Information America, an online information company that was the first to make courthouse information available from remote terminals in lawyer’s offices. The business began as a two person start-up, grew with financing from friends and family and eventually received venture capital backing. It grew to over $40,000,000 in revenues and eventually became a public company trading on the NASDAQ. Customers included virtually every major law firm in the United States, most of the Fortune 100 and many large federal agencies including the FBI, the DEA and the CIA. In 1994, Information America was acquired by West Publishing, the largest legal publisher in the world and soon after West was acquired by Thomson, a multi-national information publishing company.

Mr. Goldstein worked at West and Thomson for two years where Mr. Goldstein ran a number of divisions and in 1998 Mr. Goldstein founded, in cooperation with Mellon Ventures, netWorth Partners, a venture capital fund focused on internet-based businesses. netWorth merged with Mellon in 2000 and Mr. Goldstein served as a partner in Mellon Ventures until 2004, investing in a large number of emerging businesses and serving on the Board of Directors of over 15 companies.

Mr. Goldstein returned to Chapel Hill in the spring of 2004 to help build the Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative and serve as the University Entrepreneur in Residence. Mr. Goldstein is married with two kids, one works for the Huffington Post and the other for the Boston Red Sox.

"When Mr. Goldstein saw the first web browser (Mosaic) Mr. Goldstein was so stunned Mr. Goldstein couldn’t talk. It turned the world of information on its ear and Mr. Goldstein couldn’t make sense of it. Mr. Goldstein decided the best way to understand what was going on was to teach a class called Entrepreneurship on the Internet and learn from his students. That turned out to be a great decision and a number of businesses were started from that class which Mr. Goldstein taught for MBA’s at Emory University over a three year period."