Entrepreneur and CEO Josh Silverman Joins Greylock as an Executive in Residence
October 7, 2010 12 Comments
Josh Silverman
We are very pleased to welcome Josh Silverman to Greylock. Josh was one of our CEO/Co-Founders when David was first building the Greylock consumer internet practice here in Silicon Valley. Many of the partners here have followed Josh’s achievements, and look forward to working together again.
Josh is a natural fit for Greylock—a serial entrepreneur and experienced chief executive with experience, drive and talent for building disruptive companies. He is one of very few entrepreneurs who have created viral consumer products that millions of people around the world love. In addition to being an established entrepreneur, he is a terrific leader who has scaled multiple hyper-growth, billion-dollar companies. Josh’s integrity, drive, and leadership are exemplary and will be a great additional aid to our portfolio companies.
Reid first met Josh in 2000 when he was an EVP at PayPal and Josh was CEO of Evite. It was clear to Reid after the first conversation that he would look for opportunities for us to work together. David also first met Josh in 2000, as a partner at Greylock building the consumer practice.
After a decade of friendship and collaboration, here’s what we know about Josh.
He is a visionary entrepreneur. In the early days of the Internet, Josh co-founded Evite, a Greylock-backed company that has become the leading social event-planning site on the Internet. Josh ran the company as CEO until he sold it to Barry Diller and IAC in 2001. Today Evite.com facilitates more than sixteen million invitations to more than 450,000 events each month. Josh also launched eBay’s online classifieds business in Europe. He built it from the ground up to a leading position in European classifieds in less than a year.
He is an effective leader for amazing growth companies. Josh joined Skype in April 2008 when Skype was transitioning from being a division of eBay to an independent business. Under Josh, Skype doubled its user base and revenue, expanded to mobile phones and TVs and struck breakthrough partnerships with other leading companies, including Facebook and Verizon. Josh led the spinout of Skype from eBay in November 2009. Skype is a great disruptive company, creating a new global platform for communications. In the past year, Skype has grown from 397 to 560M registered users, and from 8% to 12% of the world’s international calling minutes. Shopping.com, another business Josh ran as CEO, is the 6th largest e-commerce destination in the US and a leader in the UK, France, Germany, and Australia.
Everyone here at Greylock is looking forward to Josh joining the firm as an Executive in Residence. His perspective and experience as a creator and builder of influential, innovative companies will benefit not only Greylock but also the entrepreneurs we partner with.
Reid Hoffman is Co-Founder and Chairman at LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock Partners. He is a member of the founding team at PayPal and has been an angel investor and adviser to dozens of organizations including Facebook, Zynga, Flickr and Last.FM. He currently serves on the boards of LinkedIn, Zynga, Shopkick, Kiva.org and Mozilla. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman.
David Sze is a partner at Greylock since 2000. His investments include Facebook, LinkedIn, digg, Revision3, Oodle, SGN, Seven, and Pandora. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/davidsze.
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