Congrats to the Workday team!

October 24, 2011 2 Comments

Congratulations to Greylock portfolio company Workday on announcing their new $85M financing round led by T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus Capital Group Inc and Jeff Bezos.  Arik Hesseldahl at All Things D gives a bit more detail here as well.

It’s an amazing group of new investors, and an amazing company that Aneel Bhusri, Dave Duffield and their team have built. In just 6 years since founding (and we were fortunate enough to lead their initial institutional funding), we’ve seen Workday grow from a brand new startup to providing enterprise-critical systems in Human Capital Management, Payroll & Financial Management for more than 2 million users across more than 230 companies.

It’s been a pleasure to witness the rapid rise of Workday among customers of all sizes — it’s just a testament to how transformative cloud-based systems can be — and how much they can blow away legacy approaches to enterprise software in every respect.

So congratulations to Aneel, Dave, and the rest of Workday — we couldn’t be happier for everyone involved!

John

John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla.

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Greylock Builds Talent Team

October 17, 2011 14 Comments

People are what make companies successful.  Easy to say and surprisingly does not always receive the focus it should.  We’ve recently invested in putting together a talent team to help our portfolio companies identify the right people, at every level, recruit them effectively and succeed in the battle for talent.  Here’s a bit more information about our team.

Jeff Markowitz joined our Menlo Park Office as a Talent Partner focused on executive level talent, Dan Portillo has started as our VP of Talent focused on product and engineering.  As we’ve built out the team, our vision has focused on three key areas:

  • Providing value to the best talent, at all levels, in consumer and enterprise software
  • Exposing our portfolio companies to the best talent in the marketplace
  • Helping build HR/Talent skills across our portfolio.

Jeff joins us from Heidrick & Struggles, where he was the Managing Director of the Venture Capital Practice.  Jeff will be working side by side with Mike Ahearn, our Recruiting Partner since 2004 who will be retiring in 2012, to continue to optimize our executive talent capabilities.  In the past year, under Jeff’s leadership, Heidrick’s venture practice has grown substantially –demonstrating his operating talents both as a recruiter and as a leader.  Jeff will bring his executive search experience to our portfolio companies as well as help Greylock build our network of executive talent.  We’ve been fortunate enough to work with Jeff over many years, helping us recruit the management teams for our portfolio companies. We believe that we can fundamentally change the value we provide to both our portfolio and to the many talented executives in and outside of our network.

Dan will be helping our portfolio companies win the battle for product, engineering, and recruiting talent. Dan has been recruiting in venture backed start-ups since 2000 and joins us from Rypple, where he was the VP of Customer Success and will continue to be an advisor.  Previous to that, he was the VP of Organizational Development at Mozilla, where he worked closely with John Lilly, a Partner here at Greylock and Mozilla’s former CEO.  His operating background is a perfect fit for Greylock – all of our partners and all of our operating staff are operators first and foremost.  We believe this background allows us to understand our entrepreneurs and find the best ways to help them succeed, without adding overhead.

Some of the initiatives Dan and Jeff are working on:

  • Build recruiting skills and processes, where needed, in our portfolio.  Our first sourcing summit will take place in October (portfolio companies, look for an invite soon).
  • Connecting portfolio recruiting teams to share ideas, information, and talent – we now have a Linkedin Group for our portfolio companies to get ideas from the team as well as share ideas.
  • Help us all organize, expand, and leverage our network for great talent.
  • Place top recruiters in portfolio companies to support ongoing sourcing and recruiting as well as connect to the best recruiting resources.

There is plenty more on the way as the team ramps up.  If you are already in Greylock’s portfolio, get ready – you’ll be hearing from them.

Tom Frangione

Tom Frangione is Greylock’s COO.

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Sanjay Raman Joins Greylock Consumer Team

October 13, 2011 9 Comments

In the past month, we’ve announced that Josh Elman (http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshe) and Adam Nash (http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash) both joined Greylock. We’re very excited today to welcome one more great addition to the team, Sanjay Raman (http://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjayraman, Twitter @sanjayraman).

Sanjay is joining us as a Senior Associate on our consumer team.

We strive to hire people on our investing team who have strong product and operating backgrounds, and have worked in the trenches in both early stage companies as well as businesses at scale. We think this is the ideal background for partnering with entrepreneurs to help scale businesses. Sanjay comes to us most recently from Howcast (http://www.howcast.com), an online video startup where he was a co-founder and chief product officer. He previously worked in product management at Google, on both Google Apps/Enterprise and Google Video. Sanjay also has a master’s in computer science and engineering from M.I.T.

Given Sanjay’s experiences building and sharing how-to knowledge at Howcast, we anticipate that he’ll be the MacGyver of Greylock. Sanjay has already been teaching people about Greylock companies, for example, How to Let People Reply on Tumblr: and How to Set Up a Profile on Facebook. But there’s also other essential stuff that Sanjay learned at Howcast, like How to Build a Shelter in the Forest and How to Survive While Lost on a Mysterious Island. To quote our friends at IMDB, “Drawing on a vast practical knowledge of science, MacGyver is able to make use of any mundane materials around him to create unorthodox solutions to any problem he faces.”

Welcome Sanjay! We’re very excited to continue to learn and build together, and we know that you will help us and Greylock-backed entrepreneurs with many unorthodox solutions:)

-James Slavet


  James Slavet is a Partner at Greylock Partners

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Announcing Greylock’s Investment in Zenprise

October 11, 2011 1 Comment

We’re excited to announce that Greylock is leading a $30M financing round at Zenprise, the leader in secure mobile device management (MDM). Zenprise is headquartered in Silicon Valley and is currently recruiting across all areas as it expands to meet rapidly growing customer demand.
 
 As part of the consumerization of IT, employees are increasingly bringing personal smart phones and tablets to work and connecting them to the company network. This invasion of personal devices (Bring Your Own Device – BYOD) into the enterprise has made secure mobile device management a top priority. IT organizations are struggling to apply the appropriate management and security policy controls to the BYOD phenomena. BYOD began with iPhones and is now accelerating with iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. IT organizations are looking for a way to manage and secure across Apple, Android, Microsoft and RIM, with securing across Apple and Android devices being the urgent priority. The challenge begins at the device level and then extends into securing data, provisioning applications and managing application access to corporate resources. 
 
Zenprise provides a family of enterprise-grade, partner-ready mobile device management solutions, includg Zenprise MobileManager™ for on-premise deployments and Zencloud™ for flexible cloud deployments. These solutions offer real-time security, scalability, and high-availability across all the major mobile platforms. Gartner recently published a detailed comparison of the various vendor offerings in the MDM market and ranked Zenprise #1 for their product capabilities.  In September, Zenprise was named the top new security vendor at the annual HP Protect cyber security customer conference. Zenprise has more customers with over 25,000 devices under management than any other MDM vendor. Their largest customer has over 65,000 devices under management.
 
 The company was founded by Waheed Qureshi (PhD in Computer Science from USC) and is led by Jayaram Bhat (formerly VP of Marketing at Mercury Interactive). Zenprise has recently added several experienced executives to it’s management team and is looking to add additional talent at both senior and individual contributor levels.
 
 Mobile will recast the IT landscape just like the PC did two decades ago. We’re excited that Zenprise chose Greylock as their partner, and look forward to working closely together to help grow a market-leading company in this important product category.
 
 Asheem Chandna is a partner at Greylock Partners, where he is focused on helping founders and management teams initiate and build industry-leading companies that deliver new innovative technologies to enterprise buyers. His current company boards and investments include AppDynamics, Aquantia, Delphix, Imperva, Palo Alto Networks, Sumo Logic, TechProcess, Xsigo and Zenprise. Follow on Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn.
 
 

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Welcome Adam Nash!

October 5, 2011 2 Comments

I’m very happy to announce that Adam Nash will be joining Greylock next month as an Executive-in-Residence. In that role, Adam will work on both investing in companies and in helping to create them, and he’s bringing quite a lot to the team at Greylock.

Like all of us at Greylock, Adam is a product-oriented operator at heart, and his background shows that. I’ve known & worked with him in many contexts, reaching back nearly 20 years — I actually first got to work with him when he was young student at Stanford.

After starting his career as a software engineer at Apple (working on WebObjects!) and a product manager at Preview Systems, he attended HBS followed by time working for Atlas Venture.

More recently he was a Director at eBay where he was the general manager for the team responsible for eBay Express in North America — a fundamental shift in how eBay worked.

And of course he’s coming to us now from his role as Vice President, Product Management at LinkedIn, where over the last 4 years he’s been responsible for starting and running their User Experience & Design team, leading product strategy for much of the site, and leading their search & cloud efforts, developer platform work, and their mobile products, not to mention starting their Hackdays.  (If you haven’t taken a look at their new iPhone app, you should — in my view it’s a state of the art mix of HTML5 and native mobile technology.)

He’s also got a fantastic curiosity and interest in all things Silicon Valley & technology, having written about topics like the Cultural Importance of T-Shirts and how Designers Can Get the Most out of their Product Managers.

And at one point, I’m pretty sure he was the mayor of FarmVille. :-)

It’s been fantastic to work together with Adam so many times over the past 20 years — I’m even more excited to add him to the investment team here at Greylock.

Welcome, Adam!

John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla.

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Announcing our investment in Coupons.com

October 3, 2011 1 Comment

We’re very pleased today to announce our investment in Coupons.com Inc.  Reid Hoffman and James Slavet collaborated on this investment for Greylock Partners. We’re excited to work with Coupons.com Founder/CEO Steven Boal and his team as they continue to build a substantial, market defining company.

It¹s rare these days to find a tech business where the reality actually exceeds the hype – especially here in Silicon Valley. By this we mean a company that is a clear market leader, with a rapidly growing business, but has focused their attention on execution rather than self-promotion.  Based in Mountain View, Coupons.com is this kind of unusual company. We think it¹s one of the Silicon Valley tech industry¹s better kept secrets.

There were 330 billion coupons distributed in the United States last year. That’s right, 330 billion. Over 85% of these coupons were actually distributed through free standing inserts (FSIs) in the offline Sunday newspaper. As consumer readership and time spent continues to shift away from offline to online, the multi-billion dollar coupon industry is also shifting over to digital as a dramatically more efficient marketing channel.

Steven and his management team, drawn from companies like Google, Yahoo and Catalina Marketing, have been heads down building the foundation of a marketing services juggernaut. Coupons.com is the market leader in the digital couponing space, including online printable, social, mobile and loyalty card coupons. Their clients include virtually every major consumer packaged goods company, such as Kraft and General Mills, as well as almost every major supermarket and drug store chain, such as Safeway and Walgreens. Coupons.com provides essential infrastructure for marketers to migrate coupons online.  They provide an end-to-end technology platform to enable coupons to be safely and securely distributed, printed, redeemed, cleared and settled. Powering this essential infrastructure is a smart entrepreneurial path, and sets the stage for building very large company. Today, the vast majority of online coupons are printed through Coupons.com and through their network of partner sites.

The Coupons.com business is poised for a tremendous next chapter of innovation and growth. Steven and his team are embarking on an aggressive growth strategy, including rapidly expanding their product and engineering team, extending their product leadership in the mobile and social spaces with applications like GroceryIQ , and targeting select acquisitions. We think our experiences working with product-driven startups, and especially in social and mobile, will be a great mutual fit. The next generation of CPG and retailer Facebook fan pages and Twitter streams will be coupon-enabled. So too will the location-aware shopping list on your smartphone, complete with coupons that are redeemed right from your mobile device  Coupons.com will be the underlying platform that powers these offers, and ensures that they are secure, relevant and compelling.

We¹re excited that Steven and the Coupons.com team chose Greylock as a partner to assist in this next phase of product innovation and business growth.

James and 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., Shopkick, and Kiva.org. His complete profile can be found here.

James Slavet is a partner on the consumer technology team at Greylock Partners. James’ investments include Auditude, Groupon, High Gear Media, One Kings Lane, Redfin, Revision3 and TellApart.

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