Greylock Partners Welcomes Data Wizard DJ Patil

I am happy to announce that DJ Patil has joined Greylock Partners as Data Scientist in Residence from Color, where he was Chief Product Officer.

DJ Patil

DJ and I have been working together to solve data problems for years. DJ led the build out of the data and analytics group at LinkedIn. Indeed, our many conversations about data led me to my “Data is Web 3.0″ thesis, which I presented at South by Southwest this past March. In short, the idea is that people generate a massive amount of data when they use Web 2.0 applications. Creative companies and organizations can use that data as a foundation for a new set of unique and innovative products and services. DJ’s team proved this thesis at LinkedIn by building some of the most highly trafficked applications at LinkedIn, including People You May Know, Who’s Viewed My Profile, Career Explorer and Skills.

We at Greylock believe that data strategy will be a key ingredient to the success of most high-growth tech companies today—especially those building products and services in software, Internet and mobile. Now is the time to leverage data in new ways to create useful, fun and engaging experiences. Many of the companies we support have built data functions into their organizations. My partner James and I wrote a blog post in January about the Power of Data as a way to explain why we invested in Groupon.

The more we talked about this theme internally at Greylock, the more our conversations turned to how we can use it to help our companies. A few months ago we pulled together a hands-on data summit for our companies and other friends, which we held at LinkedIn. Speakers and attendees included data, product and engineering talent from Cloudera, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, One Kings Lane, Pandora, Redfin, Rich Relevance and Zynga. DJ gave a talk on “data jujitsu” and helped us think through the right content that would make for a compelling and useful workshop.

The summit was a hit, and showed us that our companies have strong appetites to learn more ways to leverage data as a competitive tool. Finally, we realized we needed an in-house expert. DJ had already demonstrated his abilities in building new and innovative data practices at LinkedIn and it was clear to us that he was the right person to help us with this on a full-time basis.

DJ is the natural entrepreneurial leader for this work, as he has built new groups around his ideas and worked with start-ups in multiple capacities. At LinkedIn he worked closely with Greylock-backed Cloudera to implement Hadoop and sponsor technologies like Voldemort, Askaban and Kafka. He has held roles at Skype,PayPal and eBay. As LinkedIn’s Chief Security Officer he partnered with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga and others to take on hackers, spammers and fraudsters. He has also done strategic advisory work for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and Civilian Research and Development Foundation.

In his new role DJ will help Greylock-backed start-ups to learn the art of data jujitsu. Together they will build core competencies and teams around data, conceive new data strategies to optimize decision-making and create new user-facing products.

At LinkedIn, DJ's team came up with multiple ideas of how to visualize and make use of data, including network maps, like this one. Make your own map here: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/

I’m looking forward to partnering with DJ again. Welcome, DJ!

–Reid

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. Reid is a board observer at Airbnb, Gowalla, and Swipely, an advisor to Groupon and a director at Zynga, Mozilla Corp., Six Apart, Shopkick, and Kiva.org. His complete profile can be found here.