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Billionaire's Family Making Moves in Tech

Zachary Dell

Zachary Dell with his sisters Kira and Juliette at Alexa Dell and Harrison Refoua's engagement party in 2018. Stefanie Keenan/WireImage

Michael Dell's son, Zachary Dell, works at Thrive Capital, which invests in internet, software, and tech companies.

Previously, Zach Dell was a private-equity analyst at Blackstone for a little over a year — he'd worked there as a summer analyst after graduating from college in 2019.

Zach Dell attended the University of Southern California, where he studied psychology and economics and was in the Sigma Chi fraternity, according to his LinkedIn. While at USC, he was a summer intern at MSD Capital, his father's family office.

While he was in high school, Zach Dell founded a dating app similar to Tinder called Thread. His LinkedIn indicates he was the chairman and founder of the company from July 2013 to January 2016. Thread, which was available only to students who had a University of Texas email address, was focused on finding relationships instead of hookups and used the tagline "Stay Classy," HuffPost reported.

Though Zach Dell said his father wasn't an investor in his app, he counted among his investors Mark Benioff, the Salesforce CEO and good friend of his father's, and the Silicon Valley "super angel" investor Ron Conway.

"I heard 'no' a lot," Zach Dell told Total Frat Move about fundraising. "Early on, it was tough to convince investors to roll the dice on an 18-year-old kid, but after a while, word started to spread that I was the real deal, and some of the top investors in the industry were willing to hop onboard."

His father was, however, listed as a company advisor, as was Whitney Wolfe Herd, the Tinder cofounder who would go on to cofound Bumble and is a close friend of his sister's.

"My dad and I are extremely close," Zach Dell told Silicon Hills News in 2014. "When I started asking him about starting his business and what it meant to be an entrepreneur, he started telling me more and more. He would give me little lessons every time we were in the car and use real-world examples, like the Bernie Madoff scandal, to teach me about insider trading."

Thread failed to take off, but Zach Dell tried his hand at entrepreneurship again, founding Sqwatt, a startup that was supposed to build "low-cost sanitation solutions for the developing world," HuffPost reported. (The company now appears to be called SaniSolvr.) His LinkedIn says he was head of operations and growth for Sqwatt from September 2016 to January 2020.

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Lorie Orum

Update: 2024-05-22