by Richard Nieva
Jay Levy, cofounder and partner at New York-based Zelkova Ventures, was drowning in legal and regulatory paperwork, with fevered anxiety, when it hit him: “I’m an entrepreneur again.”
Levy, whose firm’s portfolio companies include Fab, Klout, and Livefyre, this week launched his own business: an ecommerce wine company named Uproot, cofounded alongside Greg Scheinfeld, a Napa winemaker. Getting the proper licenses and accreditations to make and sell wine took a stressful year and a half, he says.
After years in venture capital funding early stage startups, Levy says he missed the romance of entrepreneurship. In college, he was the first employee at Uconnections.com, a failed Web portal that he describes as Yahoo for college campuses. Now he’s giving it another go-around.