The new season of 'Shark Tank' will feature one of Uber's first investors, Lady Gaga's former manager and Ashton Kutcher
The guests include actor Ashton Kutcher, who's also the founder of VC firm A-Grade Investments; Chris Sacca, a former Google executive and the founder of VC firm Lowercase Capital; and Troy Carter, the founder of entertainment management company Atom Factory, who has managed the careers of musicians like Lady Gaga, Recode reports.
Kutcher's investment portfolio includes tech startups like Foursquare, Spotify, Airbnb, and Uber. Sacca was an early Uber, Instagram, and Twitter investor. And Carter has backed Uber, Dropbox, Spotify, and Warby Parker.
The new season, which starts in September, is in its 7th season. It features entrepreneurs pitching their company and product ideas to a group of investors, who either broker a deal right there or turn down the entrepreneurs on the spot.
Sacca tells Fortune that he'll be investing with his own money on "Shark Tank," but that if Matt Mazzeo, his partner at Lowercase, wants to invest, he'll be able to do so as part of Lowercase's funds. "That was the way I felt it was fairest for LPs," Sacca told Fortune's Erin Griffith.
Sacca has been skeptical of "Shark Tank" in the past - even going so far as to call out a few of the show's investors on Twitter:
In a new blog post, though, he says that meeting with the show's producers and talking to investors who watch the show have changed his mind.
"What I had thought was a carnivalesque send-up of the world of venture capital is actually wildly popular among my investing peers. I had no idea," Sacca said on his blog.
He says he agreed to be on the show because it reminded him of the simplicity of investing when he was just starting out. "It was all about the product itself and musing about how to make it awesome. I have missed that simplicity, focus, and purity so much," he says.
In addition, Sacca adds that Shark Tank lets him meet a more diverse group of entrepreneurs than he'd ever get to meet in Silicon Valley. "As you have likely read or experienced firsthand, Silicon Valley startup founders tend to be male, and many ethnicities are very underrepresented in our industry," Sacca says on his blog. "Yet, Shark Tank has already given me the chance to mix it up with brave women and men from across the country and from staggeringly diverse backgrounds. It has been so refreshing."