One Kings Lane Raises $40 million

September 19, 2011 1 Comment

Congrats to Doug Mack, Susan Feldman, Alison Pincus, and the entire One Kings Lane team on today’s announcement of a $40 million round of financing, led by Tiger Global (http://tcrn.ch/pzEvbn).
Doug, Susan and Ali are the foundation of a special team that is absolutely cranking.

At the time of our investment, I wrote a blog posting called “How Ecommerce Got Its Groove Back” (http://greylockvc.com/2011/02/11/how-e-commerce-got-its-groove-back/). That posting focused on how One Kings Lane was at the forefront of a new wave of e-commerce companies with fundamentally better business models. I wrote then about three factors that stood out for us about the company. First, a team that is a unique blend of right and left brain talent. Second, a growing customer base of addicts and evangelists. And third, a huge market for home décor that lacked an existing dominant online brand.

My excitement about the business continues to grow, just as the stack of fresh One Kings Lane delivery boxes continues to pile up in the front hallway of our house. The One Kings Lane team has continued to get deeper and stronger, the customer base has dramatically expanded yet has also remained highly engaged, and the business is on track to exceed $100 million in revenue this year. Pretty amazing progress for a company that is not yet three years old! There’s still no dominant online brand in the market for home décor. But I think the One Kings Lane team has the passion, talent and resources to change that.

It’s been a great pleasure working with you. Keep on jamming!

-James Slavet
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.

Filed under E-Commerce, Greylock Updates Tagged with , , , ,

Three Steps To Building The Right Audience Through Email

July 20, 2011 Leave a comment

Many people (including me) have written about why it makes sense for business marketers to invest in producing high-quality, original content. But no author wants to pour his heart out, hit “send” and then hear nothing but crickets.

Once you’ve mastered the art of writing compelling email content, you need to get distribution. There are three steps to intelligently building your email following: promotion, deliverability and optimization.

Get some love from your audience

Step #1: Promotion

Distribution starts with making it easy for people to sign up to receive your emails. Sounds obvious, right? Yet most websites don’t promote their email newsletters in even obvious ways.

Check out your site and see if you’re promoting your email newsletter in the right spots. You might be surprised by what you find. A few basics you should have in place:

  • Put an email capture box on either the upper right or lower right corner of your home page and consistently throughout your site.
  • Provide sign-up opportunities on user profile or account management pages.
  • Offer this again at checkout and in transaction confirmation emails.

Social media is email’s friend, not foe. Promote your email newsletter content on your Twitter feed and Facebook page so that people who are following you can get a taste for the type of content you provide in emails. Build your email distribution through social channels by making sure your subject lines are conducive to sharing through Facebook and Twitter. Your subject lines should be short, creative and interesting (a few examples: “Ditch the denim and show some leg;” “What I learned about how the real estate industry really works;” “When bad companies do good things”). Pithy subject lines are fodder for tweets.

Encourage email subscribers to like you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter. Several major ISPs are starting to rank emails within in-boxes based on social media signals. At some point your email will likely be prioritized up in consumers’ in-boxes if they’ve opted to connect with you through Facebook and Twitter.

Martin Lieberman writes a great blog about email marketing for Constant Contact. His writings have informed my thinking about email promotion and other topics. More from Martin and team can be found here.

Step #2: Deliverability

You can grow your email list through on-site and social media promotion but a large list won’t matter if all those potential customers aren’t getting your emails. Unlike the U.S. judicial system, ISPs presume all emailers are guilty (of SPAM) and need to prove their innocence. And ISPs are becoming even more stringent in trying to protect users from the deluge of unwanted messages overwhelming in-boxes.

Deliverability starts with making sure you’re white-listed across the key ISPs, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail. You can do this directly if you’re operating at scale, or you can use a third party email service provider such as Responsys, ExactTarget or Constant Contact. You should manage to a 98% deliverability rate or higher (this means 98% of the emails you send are being received by users).

The other component of deliverability is formatting and display. You should know what your emails look like across different ISPs, browsers and mobile.

Deliverability can also vary by individual message. One early stage startup we’re invested in recently sent out an entertaining Viagra-focused video to their email subscribers. The video was hilarious, but unfortunately none of the company’s customers got the joke. Using “Viagra” in the subject line got the note tripped up in ISP spam filters.

Size matters–but only partly. If you focus too much on list size versus list quality, you’ll not only damage your relationship with customers, you’ll also shoot yourself in the deliverability foot. You should be clear on the email sign-up page how often subscribers will receive a message from you and make opting out an easy one-click process instead of a Mensa test.

It’s also important to actively manage your list and remove people who aren’t responding. Over the course of a year, a meaningful volume of your email will go to dead email addresses, and you should process and scrub these bounces out right away. Some ISPs are starting to use engagement stats like open rates as a factor for determining how reputable different email senders are and therefore where in a recipient’s inbox a sender’s message should go.

If you called a woman fifteen times in a row to ask her on a date and she never called you back, you’d stop calling right? The same applies to email. If someone hasn’t opened any of your emails in the past three to four months, you may want to remove him from your list.

Des Cahill, the former CEO of an email marketing company and an email marketing adviser to companies, is quite thoughtful on the subject of deliverability and beyond. Check out his blog here.

Step #3: Optimization

You should set up a few core metrics to track and optimize, including open rates, click-through rates and churn. Through cohort analysis, you can follow the trending click-through and transaction rates of a group of users who signed up in a particular month through subsequent periods, and then also compare how that group’s level of activity and attrition stacks up relative to previous groups of users.

Pete Sheinbaum, the former CEO of Daily Candy, shared a useful email scoring metric with me. By focusing on ensuring at least a 10-to-1 ratio between positive actions they want users to perform (click-throughs) versus negative actions (unsubscribes), companies can be conscious of monitoring both the good and bad results of each email sent.  So if one customer unsubscribes to a test email, you should effectively deduct ten click-throughs from your internal scoring. If that causes you to fall below your goal, pull the campaign.

In addition to tracking core metrics, there are a few ways you can optimize your communications to make sure the right message gets to the right person in the right way. Core optimizations include:

Segmentation: To whom are you sending the email? Send an email to the wrong segment of your file, and it may not matter what you say: your metrics will stink. While some traditional marketers obsess about creative, the biggest needle mover on performance is good list segmentation. Email marketers are increasingly segmenting their customers into buckets based on behavior (i.e. what they’ve clicked on, viewed or purchased) and are targeting communications accordingly.

Product: Are you offering a deal? If you’re an e-commerce company, what product are you showing? Does it look good?

Creative:  The copy and design in the body of the message matter. But more importantly, do you have the right subject line?

Timing: Are you sending at the right time of day and day of week, and with the right frequency? A nuanced approach is to alter email frequency for different customer segments. Perhaps your more active and engaged customers hear from you more often. You could also give customers the option to “opt down” or “opt up” in terms of frequency rather than just opting out altogether.

Email is still one of the most effective ways for you to build relationships with your customers. If you take a smart approach to building your audience, it can pay off big-time.

*Disclaimer: Greylock Partners is an investor in Constant Contact.

*This article also appeared on Forbes.com.

-James

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.

Filed under Advice for Entrepreneurs, E-Commerce, Industry Insights, Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

How to Write Emails Your Customers Will Actually Read

July 19, 2011 4 Comments

Consistency is key: Don't be Sarah Silverman on your website....

Most businesses are dazed and confused about email marketing. I’m not talking about old school offline businesses. I’m talking about new school online start-ups. They’re completely dialed into social media marketing through Facebook and Twitter, but are under-investing in or misfiring on their email programs.

Private sale and local deals companies have figured out how to make some customers actually look forward to their email messages. These companies have built breakout businesses on the back of email. You don’t have to be in the private sale or local deals space to build your business through email. There are lessons other companies can learn from the email mechanics these companies have adopted and refined.

It’s not easy to stand out among the noise and clutter of the in-box. It’s like standing on the side of the highway in your underwear holding up a small, handwritten sign, hoping the cars whizzing past will read your message.

A few general industry stats to make you feel worse before you feel better: Eighty percent of commercial emails don’t get opened. Ninety-five percent of commercial emails don’t get clicked on. Half of all mailing list churn comes from people unsubscribing to a specific email sender–the other half comes from people periodically swapping out their email addresses. So if you think you’re standing still in building your email audience, the bad news is you’re actually shrinking.

...and Margaret Thatcher in your emails (photo credit Getty Images)

In spite of the challenges, email is still one of the most effective ways to attract and build customer relationships. Most marketers will tell you that their email subscribers are more engaged and more likely to convert to transactions than their Facebook fans or Twitter followers. Billions of dollars of transactions and value flow through email.

Building your business through email starts with writing content that your customers want to read. There are three elements to crafting good email content: subject lines, voice and timeliness.

Headlines Matter

Newsmen know this better than anyone: Headlines matter.  People decide in a few seconds or less whether they’ll open your email. So if your message doesn’t instantly attract, you’ve missed your chance. Subject lines should be brief, so that the recipient’s email client does not cut them off. And subject lines should also be social media friendly. When your email is shared on Facebook or Twitter, it’s the subject line that will most likely double as the status update.

  • Subject lines should be attention getting and action oriented. They should lure the reader to want to see what’s inside (“Fried chicken that tops the Colonel’s”) in a way that is not misleading (that chicken had better be good!).
  • Putting a number in your subject line makes what you’re saying quantifiable and gives readers a sense for what benefit they can expect from taking the time to click through (“Only four seats left!”).
  • Inserting a few recognizable and appealing consumer brands also helps to drive click through rates (“70% off DC Comics and Skechers”).

There is art involved in getting the subject line right, but there is also science. Subject lines lend themselves well to A/B testing. You should experiment with alternative approaches and see what generates the highest rates of click-throughs and conversions.

Martin Lieberman writes a great blog about email marketing for Constant Contact. His writings have informed my thinking.  I recommend you check out more of his stuff here.

Have A Voice

I recently caught up with my friend Pete Sheinbaum, who led the godfather of email businesses, Daily Candy, as CEO until early 2009. Daily Candy was to functional and entertaining email copy what Albert Einstein was to the field of quantum physics. “We wanted to have a voice, a personality – be useful, quirky and interesting,” said Sheinbaum. “We always felt that while our readers might not act on every one of our e-mails, at least we made you smile.”

Not every e-mail pitch has to be hilariously funny, but something about it has to give people a reason to welcome your e-mail into their crowded, noisy in-boxes. Otherwise, people will unsubscribe, label your e-mails as spam, or just let the message die, unopened, in their in-box backwash.

Totally commercial content becomes transparent to the consumer, and readers will quickly tire of content that is generic. Martin Lieberman from Constant Contact said it well when he said that you want to “make your customers want to date you.”

Don’t underestimate the value of hiring a great writer. It’s essential to bundle your useful information in a package of personality. It pays to keep it light–yet smart, funny content isn’t easy to create. In its early days, Groupon hired stand-up comedians as copywriters.

The same company should not sound like Sarah Silverman on its website and Margaret Thatcher in its emails. You first need to understand what your brand identity is and then stay true to that identity across all your channels of customer communication, including email, website, Facebook and Twitter.

Don’t Be Needy; Be Timely

It’s also important to be thoughtful about how often you communicate and about what. Don’t be too overbearing or too distant. If you communicate too often you risk wearing out your welcome. Too infrequently and you risk your customers forgetting about you.

While the daily deal and private sale companies are an exception to this rule, most email marketers send messages weekly, with occasional additional emails tied to special occasions. Given that you’re pushing information to people, it’s smart to send them information they might not otherwise have known about, something that has changed, or something that they might want to know about first–similar to the way smart mobile apps send push notifications. For example One Kings Lane alerts customers that a sale is on, Expedia notifies customers about fare changes to popular destinations and Mint sends personalized updates to customers on the value of their financial portfolios.

The key question to ask yourself before hitting “send” on that customer email: Is what I have to say useful and new?

Getting the content right is a necessary but not sufficient step to making email marketing work. I’m going to follow up with additional thoughts on the mechanics of growing your email list and driving email customer engagement.

*Disclaimer: Greylock Partners is an investor in a number of companies mentioned in this post: Constant Contact, Groupon, Facebook and One Kings Lane.

*This post also appeared on Forbes.com.

-James

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.

Filed under Advice for Entrepreneurs, E-Commerce, Industry Insights, Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

How E-Commerce Got its Groove Back

February 11, 2011 11 Comments

E-commerce was an innovation wasteland for most of the past decade. While social media companies such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter were growing exponentially, breakthrough new commerce start-ups have been few and far between. As our friends at First Round Capital noted in this blog post, 7 out of the top 15 sites on the Web were started in the past decade but only 1 of the top 15 e-commerce sites was started during this same period. Who was that new, major e-commerce entrant? Umm, NewEgg.

There haven’t been many exciting financial outcomes, either. I’m not talking about pioneers such as Amazon or eBay but the start-ups that came later. Sure, there are a few, such as Zappos, Diapers.com and Stubhub, but not many.

Classic e-commerce businesses were mostly saddled with high customer acquisition costs (loads of Google Adwords spend), low customer retention (one-off transactions), and operating models that consumed cash (due to warehouses full of inventory).

But the e-commerce market is big and ripe for innovation. E-commerce is now more than four times the size of the annual online advertising market. Yet it’s only four percent penetrated.

Better Models Emerge

The same trends that have driven innovation elsewhere on the Web – social, local and mobile – are now driving an emerging class of opportunities in e-commerce. A few years ago, a wave of entrepreneurs started engineering new social commerce models and this innovation is paying off in the form of rapidly growing businesses.

This emerging class of companies features Groupon in local commerce, Gilt in private sales and also earlier-stage start-ups in areas including subscription commerce (Shoedazzle), mobile commerce (Shopkick) and next generation marketplaces (Airbnb). Social commerce entrepreneurs have architected fundamentally better models. They’ve replaced consumer experiences that were uninspiring and overwhelming with experiences that are curated, exciting and addictive. They’ve reduced customer acquisition costs through word-of-mouth promotion and improved lifetime customer value by re-engaging customers on a regular basis. They’ve also produced more efficient operating models by holding little-to-no inventory and getting paid by customers before they have to pay vendors.

Now there are hundreds of start-ups racing around the social commerce track. When evaluating new investments at Greylock, we ask ourselves what will be the defining characteristics of the few companies that make it to the winner’s circle?

One company we’re excited about is One Kings Lane, a promising start-up founded in late 2008 and based in San Francisco. We just announced an investment in the company this morning. One Kings Lane is focused on helping people find high-quality products at great values for home and living, such as furniture, accessories, art, kitchenware, food and wine. We think the company illustrates a few characteristics that will be common among successful social commerce start-ups.

Left Brain, Right Brain

The most successful social commerce teams will combine highly-developed right and left brains. The right brain is essential from the earliest days of a company’s life. By right brain I mean the instincts and passion to recognize and deliver an experience that will resonate in a deep, authentic way with the customer. Most v 1.0 e-commerce sites didn’t seem to use much of the right brain. In social commerce the experience starts with identifying great merchandise that’s unique and hard to find—you can’t just get it anywhere. The experience extends to story-telling so that the company describes the merchandise in a compelling way. In the end, it is wrapped up in a brand and experience that customers are excited to identify with and participate in.

In e-commerce operations there are never-ending opportunities for the left brain to test, iterate and improve. The best companies relentlessly crunch data generated from initial customer contacts through to transactions.

The One Kings Lane launch team nailed the initial customer experience. They provided access to “accessible luxury” through a curated selection of unique, high quality products for the home refreshed on a daily basis and sold at reasonable prices. One Kings Lane arrived like a trusted, knowledgeable, stylish friend to help shoppers (mostly women) on their never-ending quest to find great products to decorate their homes and entertain. It was the team’s highly-functioning right brain that recognized and tastefully marketed the truly great finds.

But the One Kings Lane team, including CEO Doug Mack, founders Alison Pincus and Susan Feldman and a management team drawn from Walmart.com, eBay, Amazon, Zappos and Netflix, also represents some of the more highly-tuned left brains in online retail today.

Some teams’ brains are strong on the right or the left, but the magic comes when they’re strong on both sides.

Addicts and Evangelists

In the past, even the best known e-commerce companies grew at a linear pace and acquired the vast majority of their traffic through a combination of paid marketing and SEO. Commerce didn’t take off right away through Facebook and Twitter because the products and the experiences most people engage with on classic e-commerce sites were engineered for simplicity, speed, and comprehensiveness. They just weren’t exciting, fun or interesting enough to warrant sharing with friends.

What makes a social commerce business work at the core is an experience that is fundamentally worth sharing. The act of sharing involves social capital – you’re withdrawing a deposit from the social capital account with a friend when you share something lame with him, and you’re earning social capital when you share something cool.

Most social commerce companies do spend money on marketing (in some cases lots of it) but the key difference is that their ROI on paid marketing is amplified by high lifetime value customers (addicts) and viral spread (evangelists). This amplification is what’s driving the near exponential growth and increasing defensibility of breakout social commerce companies. When customers are addicted and willingly infect their friends, strong companies get stronger and become ever more difficult to beat.

I first discovered One Kings Lane through my wife and her friends. The women in our neighborhood were showing signs of One King’s Lane addiction. Online products that inspire this kind of daily habit are unusual. One King’s Lane customers are their greatest champions and the company is acquiring the majority of their customers through word of mouth.

Markets, Not Just Mechanics

Social commerce companies are adopting a range of mechanics that have proven successful in driving user behavior in other kinds of existing social products – including invitation-based access, time-limited sales, daily emails, offers tied to friend referrals and achievements. Over time, I think we will see more e-commerce companies attempt to replicate the mechanics of existing players. Some will execute well on these features, most will not.

But the ultimate driver of new valuable social commerce businesses will be based on the potential of the underlying market the company is addressing. Is it a big enough market? Is it poorly served by existing players?

We were attracted to One Kings Lane’s vertical focus. There are very few consumer verticals that aren’t already dominated by an existing online brand. The market for home décor products is under served and massive: $150 billion. Think about this question: Who is the defining Web-native e-commerce brand today for home décor products? It doesn’t exist. Williams Sonoma generates billions in annual revenue but lacks unique selection. There’s a huge amount of vendor fragmentation in the space, which makes it hard for consumers to discover new brands.

One Kings Lane is emerging as the leading e-commerce player in the home décor vertical and the business opportunity is about more than just daily emails or events – it’s about successfully addressing a massive, under served market.

A new generation of breakout social commerce companies is emerging. It’s an exciting time to shop!

*Disclosure: Greylock Partners is invested in some of the companies mentioned in this post: Airbnb, Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn, One Kings Lane and Shopkick.

*This article also appeared in TechCrunch here.

-James

James Slavet is a partner at Greylock. His primary areas of investment focus are e-commerce, online advertising, and Web-enabled consumer services. James leads Greylock’s investments in Auditude, High Gear Media, One Kings Lane, Redfin, Revision 3 and TellApart and is actively involved with Groupon and LinkedIn. He previously represented Greylock in its investments in Farecast (acquired by Microsoft) and Kongregate (acquired by Gamestop) His complete profile can be found at LinkedIn here.

Filed under E-Commerce, Industry Insights Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Why We Invested in Groupon: The Power of Data

January 11, 2011 18 Comments

Groupon's Andrew Mason, CEO, and Rob Solomon, President

Groupon has been written about a lot in the media. Most of the coverage has been extremely positive, like a Forbes cover which called Groupon “The Fastest Growing Company Ever.” Other articles question whether Groupon is a defensible business built for the long-haul.

Late last year we boarded a Chicago-bound plane, along with a couple of our colleagues, for an initial meeting with the company to form our own opinion.

We went in positively inclined towards the Groupon management team. James had worked directly with Rob Solomon, Groupon’s president, years ago at Yahoo. Reid had gotten to know Andrew Mason, the company’s founder and CEO, after they struck up a conversation a while back at an industry conference. Groupon is targeting a market that is huge and broken. Local advertising is a $100 billion annual business in the U.S. and consumers spend something like 80% of their disposable income within a couple miles of their homes. Many local businesses still try to attract new customers through that heavy yellow book that gets dropped on your front doorstep until it rots or gets tossed in the recycling bin. We were interested in the team and the market and we’d also read the publicly available estimates about Groupon’s almost inconceivable growth in new markets, subscribers, business customers and revenue.

All those things were enough to get us on the plane, but it takes a lot of conviction in the future of a business to pull out your checkbook when the pre-money valuation has this many zeroes.

We knew that Groupon had a sense of humor. We emerged from our time with Groupon and our subsequent sessions together convinced that this is also a very serious business. Our discussion was data rich, unusually so. The team had a clear point of view on the consumer and merchant experience, as well as the key drivers of the business. They pre-empted and then dug deeper into our questions about Groupon’s operations and strategy by walking us through the data they look at on a regular basis. They talked us though the obvious data such as customer acquisition costs and lifetime value and the economics of entering a new region. But they also dove into some unique metrics we’d never seen startups track before.

We started really leaning forward in our chairs when the discussion turned to strategy, including the ways to use data to power Groupon’s future consumer- and merchant-facing products. Groupon is the clear market leader in the local deals market. Their scale advantage on both the consumer and merchant side enables them to offer the greatest number of high quality deals. It’s the company’s commitment to investing in personalization and relevancy that will drive deeper relationships with both consumers and merchants. Similar to markets owned by Google such as search and search advertising, this will likely become a “winner take most” market, and smart investments in driving scale plus relevancy will help propel the winner.

Groupon’s technology is there, just not where people usually look for it (on the website, which is visible to consumers). Instead, that technology lies deep in Groupon’s databases. We think the technologies visible to consumers will be increasingly commoditized, while the data used to understand consumers better will become increasingly proprietary and valuable. Groupon hired a Chief Data Officer from Netflix to help drive this effort.

Offers to consumers can be intelligently served up based on a person’s demographics, buying history and location. The merchant side of the equation is just as interesting. Local businesses need to be able to do more than just run a sale once or twice a year. The theater on Main Street or the children’s museum across town should have the ability to revenue optimize, like United Airlines or Hilton, by appropriately pricing and marketing unsold capacity. When the theatre is showing “The Tourist” to a half-empty house, it should be able to sell discounted tickets for $5 a pop.

Groupon will not be the first or the last organization to compete and win on the power of data. It’s happening everywhere around us. Turn on your TV on Sunday afternoon to watch football. Behind the scenes the coaches are relying on data scientists and proprietary algorithms to decide which players to draft or trade for, and whether to kick a field goal or go for it on fourth down. At least that’s how the New England Patriots work, and they’ve done pretty well. Closer to home, we see deep data initiatives at Greylock companies. Facebook, Pandora and Redfin use data to connect you with friends you’d forgotten about, recommend songs they know you’ll love or help you figure out when a home is over-priced.

We believe Groupon is the break-out leader in the massive local commerce space and its investment in data will be a critical ingredient in its long term march to build a meaningful and foundational company. We love to spend our days with entrepreneurs who have the ambition and skills to build break-out businesses that will endure. Sometimes that means we make a $100,000 seed-stage investment out of our Discovery Fund, and sometimes it means participating in a financing round that’s, like, a billion dollars.

-Reid and James

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.

James Slavet is a partner at Greylock. His primary areas of investment focus are e-commerce, online advertising, and Web-enabled business services. James serves on the boards of Auditude, High Gear Media, Redfin and Revision 3 and TellApart. Before joining Greylock, James was a VP/GM in the Search & Marketplace business unit at Yahoo! and was the co-founder and COO of Guru, a services marketplace acquired by Unicru. His complete profile can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesslavet.

Filed under E-Commerce, Greylock Updates, Security, Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

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.

-David 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.  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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