David C. Cole is an entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

 and philanthropist

Philanthropist

A philanthropist is someone who engages in philanthropy; that is, someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes...

. He first became successful in the publishing

Publishing

Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...

, communication

Communication

Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...

s, software, online services, and consumer products industries. Then he organized several efforts for local agriculture.
Cole grew up in Kailua, Hawaii and graduated with a Liberal Arts

Liberal arts

The term liberal arts refers to those subjects which in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free citizen to study. Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic were the core liberal arts. In medieval times these subjects were extended to include mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy...

 Degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa

University of Hawaii at Manoa

The University of Hawaii at Mānoa is a public, co-educational university and is the flagship campus of the greater University of Hawaii system...

 in 1975. In 1997, the university honored him with the UH Distinguished Alumni Award and in 2004 with an honorary doctorate degree.

From 1976 through 1980 he held a variety of positions, starting with selling Prentice-Hall textbooks, rising to become manager of a consulting firm serving emerging software companies.
From 1981 through 1984 he was chairman, president and chief executive officer of software company Ashton-Tate

Ashton-Tate

Ashton-Tate was a US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. Ashton-Tate grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation...

.
From 1985 through 1987 he was president of Ziff Communications, part of the Ziff Davis

Ziff Davis

Ziff Davis Inc. is an American publisher and Internet company. It was founded in 1927 in Chicago by William B. Ziff, Sr. and Bernard G. Davis. Throughout most of its history, it was a publisher of hobbyist magazines, often ones devoted to expensive, advertiser-rich hobbies such as cars,...

 Publishing Group.
Since the 1980s Cole invested in early-stage technology companies, including Macromedia

Macromedia

Macromedia was an American graphics and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products as Flash and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005 and controls the line of Macromedia...

, Shiva Corporation (acquired by Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

), and Tops, Inc.