David Zimmerman Warren

David is survived by his mother Geri Zimmerman Warren, his fiancé Robyn Lessans, his brother John Warren, his sister-in-law Courtney Warren, and his nephew John Steven “Stevie” Warren III.

David was born on May 19, 1985, and grew up in Greenville, SC.

He was a graduate of Greenville High School, where he was a member of the Honor Society, Palmetto Boy’s State, and the 2002 State Championship soccer team. He also founded the Teenage Republican Club and he was voted senior superlative, “Most likely to be president.” David Warren graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of the academic Gamma Beta Phi Society and the Kappa Alpha Fraternity. He began his entrepreneurial ventures his sophomore year, with the formation of Innovative Property Solutions, a real estate investment company, that flipped houses. As a senior at Vanderbilt, David represented Vanderbilt as a National Semifinalist at the Nascent-500 Business plan Competition.

After graduating college, David co-founded GadZeus!, a Web 2.0 startup headquartered in Atlanta. He then led operations for the statewide entrepreneurship initiative Startup Tennessee, part of Startup America, responsible for growing nine business accelerators across the state.

David was invited to speak to leaders across the country and the White House, on the strategies for cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems.

In 2012, David’s father, Steve, became ill with Brain Cancer, and David relocated home to assist him in developing a strategy for attacking the disease. During Steve’s battle, one particular neurooncologist at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Wake Forest Baptist noted that Steve and David’s system of fighting was “powerful,” and urged them to develop a way to train other patients. In response, Steve and David founded TaketheFight. TaketheFight is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, dedicated to training top college students and pairing them with cancer patients to help them fight more efficiently. After Steve passed, David remained in the oncology fight, accepting a position as Vice President with Northwest Bio. He returned full-time to TaketheFight in early 2015, where he acted as CEO. Over the past year, TaketheFight has launched a fellowship program, accepting top students from Princeton, Johns Hopkins, UPenn, and Cambridge. The organization currently is the subject of an NIH-funded pilot study. TaketheFight has been featured in the Academy of Oncology Nurse and Patient Navigators and the Washington Post.

Memorials may be made to TaketheFight at 1st Floor Radiation Oncology, 1 Medical Center Blvd, Winston-Salem, NC 27103.

Visitation will be held in the parlor at First Presbyterian Church in Greenville on Thursday, March 3, 2016, at 1:30 p.m.

The memorial service will follow in the main sanctuary at 2:30 p.m.