Last summer, Greylock hosted its inaugural Greylock Hackfest — an event for the top college students aspiring to be computer scientists, designers, engineers and, well, hackers. We received hundreds of applications from students from around the globe and after careful review, welcomed 160 participants that comprised 44 teams for 24 hours of hacking, mentorship and sugar rushes at Dropbox’s San Francisco HQ.
While last year’s judges included Greylock’s own Reid Hoffman, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer and Cloudera’s Mike Olson, the ones to watch were the hackfest competitors.
To qualify, we’ve already offered automatic entry to the winning teams of on-campus hackathons from schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, UPenn, among many others and starting today, we’re accepting applications for the few, remaining spots. As we start reviewing applications for this July’s greylock hackfest 2, we thought we’d highlight a few of last year’s most noteworthy participants as well as some of the students that have already qualified for this year’s hackfest.
First up, meet Richie Zeng, from UC Berkeley.
Richie’s team took 2nd place last year for their mobile platform for the real-life game, Assassins. Popular with many universities and now many Valley tech companies, Assassins is a game that demands creativity — and a high level of paranoia. Richie and his team built a platform that used your mobile phone to manage the game and provide cool elimination features using the phone’s sensors. For example, you can swing your phone if a player is next to you to simulate a sword. Interestingly enough, Richie and his team also believed that many real life games like scavenger hunts would be awesome with mobile features like that, so they worked on a more general platform for real life gaming called GIRL (Games In Real Life)
When Richie isn’t working on technology that can help us be more efficient in the offline world, he’s developing and executing on ideas before tech luminaries like Sean Parker and keeping us guessing on what his real name really is.
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Last summer, Greylock hosted its inaugural Greylock Hackfest — an event for the top college students aspiring to be computer scientists, designers, engineers and, well, hackers. We received hundreds of applications from students from around the globe and after careful review, welcomed 160 participants that comprised 44 teams for 24 hours of hacking, mentorship and sugar rushes at Dropbox’s San Francisco HQ.
Not only did our hackers get to learn and engage with their peers, but we also offered offices hours with Greylock’s DJ Patil and Josh Elman, and product, engineering, and data science stars from Pandora, SumoLogic, Walmart Labs, Dropbox, and TrialPay.
Today, I’m excited to announce this year’s Greylock Hackfest will take place on July 27, 2013 at Airbnb’s SF HQ! Applications open today at http://greylockU.com. The deadline is July 3, 2013
This year’s competition promises to be even more fiercely contested and inspirational. The winning teams of on-campus hackathons at Princeton, Cal, Stanford, UPenn, CMU, MIT and many more have already been selected to participate.
We’ve also lined up an incredible panel of judges: Google Ventures partner & Digg founder Kevin Rose, Airbnb founder Nathan Blecharcyzk, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen and Greylock partner and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
The Greylock Hackfest has quickly become a highlight of the year for us. It’s a chance for us to put a spotlight on some of the very best technologists and designers coming out of schools today such as Richie Zeng from UC Berkeley and Feross Aboukhadijeh from Stanford. We’re excited to share more stories from our Hackfest participants on our blog in the coming weeks.
We look forward to seeing you at Airbnb HQ in July.
~John Lilly
John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla.
Wealthfront’s Elliot Shmukler telling the story of “Belgium’s on fire” during last week’s #ProductSF event in San Francisco. This panel on growth strategies also featured insights from Gustaf Alströmer, Airbnb; Stan Chudnovsky, Paypal; Pete Davies, Medium & Hiten Shah, KISSMetrics.
Last week, Ty Ahmad-Taylor from Samsung and I hosted an event in the Presidio with over 120 Product Managers from around SF, Silicon Valley, and beyond. Our idea was to create an event we wished we had been to earlier in our product management careers. We wanted product managers to learn and talk about career paths, growth strategies, team management and hiring, product processes and tactics, and much more. And we hoped to make everyone realize that it isn’t just their company where people frequently ask — what does a product manager actually do?
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James Slavet shared his view on Forbes that most (2/3) of the public Internet companies worth more than $1 Billion are actually digital transactions companies – and that the trend to mobile will accelerate not diminish the trend.
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What most people don’t understand is that the best way to create a consumer Internet company worth north of a billion dollars is to build a digital transaction business – a company that connects buyers and sellers so they can more efficiently transact.
A full two-thirds of the 24 publicly traded U.S. Internet companies worth more than $1 billion are digital transaction firms.
Read more here
-James Slavet
Dan Portillo, Greylock’s VP Talent, focused on core talent (technical, product, design mostly) wrote a great post you can find on his medium and below.
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Every person who has ever had to hire for a difficult position has asked for a meeting with someone who’s not “looking” but who would be “perfect” for the job. They hope the person will help them better understand what to look for and possibly suggest a few people to consider.
Usually the process goes like this:
Person Hiring “Who do you know who’s the best at X (recruiting, sales, web development)?”
Friend: “You should talk to X, probably can’t get them, but I’ll make an intro.”
Introduction happens, with a note saying the person is awesome but they’re not looking, blah, blah, blah…
They meet, the person hiring asks questions, gets a lot of great suggestions on what to look for, different ways to think about the role and what to focus on as the first set of priorities. Maybe a few names are shared and then they part ways. Recruiting Fail. If you’re meeting someone who could be ideal for what you’re looking for don’t assume that you can’t get them. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take – Wayne Gretzky.
If you are ever in this situation, talk to them about what you’re looking for. Ask them for advice on how they would approach the job. If it were them leading the team or closing deals, whatever the job may me, what would they do. Try and place them in the role as you speak with them. As you are engaging them about the position, explain why the company is amazing. Why the challenges the person is going to be working on are unique and meaty. Explain just how important the position is to the success of the company and at the last moment, when you’re about to say goodbye, ask them if they want to meet someone else. Keep that door open, just a little bit. You’d be surprised at who you can actually close.
-Dan Portillo
Jeff Markowitz just shared a great post over on Linkedin with some of his tips to building a world class team. Below is a brief excerpt…
Most entrepreneurs wouldn’t try to produce anything without first creating a detailed product roadmap. The same should hold true for building something that’s arguably their most mission-critical product – their own executive team.
As with a product roadmap, creating an executive talent roadmap is an important step if you want great results. Without a talent roadmap, you’re likely to make any number of missteps – hiring the wrong people, waiting too long to make key hires, setting the wrong expectations (or no expectations) for your current employees and other stakeholders – missteps you can easily avoid with thoughtful planning.
With a well-thought-out plan in hand, you’ll make your hiring decisions from a position of strength, and not as part of a reactive mad scramble. As with product planning, you should expect recruiting to be an iterative and ongoing process, with many opportunities to fall into the reactive trap. But thinking proactively about building your leadership team – rather than reactively making decisions to add to or subtract from your team – will pay significant dividends as you continue to grow your company.
Continue reading here…
~Jeff Markowitz
We’re excited to announce our participation in Wealthfront’s most recent financing, led by our good friend at Index Ventures, Mike Volpi. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with Adam Nash, most recently an EIR here at Greylock. Andy Rachleff, Adam, and the entire Wealthfront team have the potential to disrupt the existing model for financial advice & management through software – and we’re glad to have a front row seat.
The asset management industry is enormous, with over $13 trillion dollars of non-institutional, non-401(k) assets in the US alone. Unfortunately, the industry is also rife with hidden fees, conflicting incentives, and inappropriate products. We believe a software-based company has the ability to offer a combination of low price, sophisticated financial advice unmatched by traditional alternatives.
Wealthfront launched its flagship service a little over one year ago, and already they’ve earned the trust to manage over $170M in client assets. When a company sees 70%+ growth in less than three months, the market is definitely signaling a product it wants and needs. With the addition of Burt Malkiel, visionary economist and author of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”, as Chief Investment Officer, and Adam as Chief Operating Officer, Wealthfront combines the highest quality investment research with the unique capabilities and scalability of software.
Wealthfront promises to take sophisticated financial advice, previously available only to the ultra-wealthy, and put it into software so that anyone can have access to it.
The Wealthfront business is poised for a tremendous next chapter of innovation and growth. They recently introduced automatic rebalancing and continuous tax loss harvesting. With ongoing investment, their software platform will continue to extend in order to address a broad set of asset classes.
We¹re excited to partner with Andy, Adam and the entire Wealthfront team . We look forward to supporting them in whatever way we can in this next phase of product innovation and business growth.
~Reid Hoffman
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 and Swipely, and a director at Zynga,Mozilla Corp., Shopkick, and Kiva.org. His complete profile can be found here.
This is significantly belated, but I’m very pleased to announce that Evan Tana joined us as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence last month.
Evan has been working on mobile software for more than most people on the planet — he was part of the founding team of shopkick (in the Greylock portfolio), he led product at Loopt, and he was early at Digital Chocolate — all 3 companies exploring the frontier of what’s possible when we’re carrying always connected computers around in our pockets.
So, naturally, he’ll be working on new ideas and products for mobile: exploring the intersection of media and communication, making more truly social & mobile experiences around daily media, and ultimately helping us interact more with our favorite people around the things we care most about.
We’re very excited he’s here at Greylock, and expect he’ll have a lot more to share with everyone soon.
~John Lilly
John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla.
Greylock is looking for an Analyst to support the Investing and Operations teams. This is a 2-3 year role, for someone early in his or her career. It should give you rare insight into great startups, as well as how venture capital works and where it is going.
How to Apply
Applicants should submit a cover letter and resume, with links to Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, Quora, GitHub, or other profiles to analyst@greylock.com. Please include any projects you think will be interesting. Please answer the following question in your cover letter:
1) What’s the most interesting startup you’ve seen recently that we likely don’t know about? What makes it promising, and what are the risks?
2) If you were to hack VC to improve a venture firm from the inside, what is the first project you’d tackle? How? What steps would you take?
Please keep your cover letter to 1 page maximum. Don’t waste space or time on fluffy stuff – the questions above are the most interesting to us. There’s no deadline – we’ll hire the right person when we find him or her.
Responsibilities
- Supporting the Operations team in building systems and processes to share information from outside of and within the firm.
- Supporting quarterly and annual reporting meetings in research and preparation.
- Supporting Investment Team with research and analysis on potential investments and sectors of interest
- Working with Greylock companies through research, analysis, and coordination around events, etc.
- Coming up with your own projects that can add disproportionate impact to Greylock and our community of founders and friends, and making them happen.
Skills and Experience
This is a detail-oriented, data-intensive role, which requires strong critical thinking and communication skills. Ideal candidates will:
- Be finishing, or have recently finished a degree in a top program.
- Have strong written and communication skills, and be comfortable interfacing directly with Greylock team members, portfolio founders and employees, LPs, and the broader community.
- Comfort with Microsoft (Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and web services (Google Docs, CMSs, data and service providers, etc.)
- Have a curious, structured, data-driven approach to problem solving, and a bias to building tools for scale over adding manpower. Be comfortable discovering, extracting, manipulating, and finding narratives in large sets of data.
- Have a CS background, or at least have some basic coding skills.
- Failing the above, a relatively technical background is still interesting (engineering, math, economics, or science).
- Be able to think up from hacking, through product, company, and into industry/market dynamics. You should have perspectives on what makes a great company great, and what makes an interesting investment interesting.
- Be able to run with a project with minimal supervision, and show great judgment and ability to execute.
The person we’re looking for is grounded in the technical, with excellent communication skills, and an ability and desire to learn how venture and great companies work.
Joseph Ansanelli shared some great thoughts about why early stage start-ups should focus exclusively on people first. Not product. Not market. A quick excerpt from the post is below. You can see the full post here.
“As an entrepreneur and now a Partner at Greylock, I have a top 10 list of what makes a company great. The first and most important one is
“People first. Strategy (and everything else) second.”
It’s a simple, yet powerful idea. For the entrepreneur aiming to build a successful and sustainable company, the most important thing to focus on is people – hiring (and firing!), leading, and engaging great people.
Why is putting people first most important? Because the best people come up with the best ideas; build the best products; figure out the right markets; hire the best people and so on…
Start with the best people, and build the company from there. I don’t think you can do it in reverse.”
Read more…
~Joseph Ansanelli
James Slavet shared some great thoughts about why mobile will actually monetize better than the desktop over on Linkedin. A quick excerpt from the post is below. You can see the full post here.
“Fred Wilson recently wrote about three major mobile revenue models: app purchases, transactions and advertising. I think there’s more to it than that. The biggest opportunity for mobile monetization is actually a love child of his second and third categories –transactional advertising.
The first wave of advertising was driven by context (e.g. Yahoo display ads). The second wave was driven by intent (e.g. Google Adwords). The next big wave will be transactional advertising. These ads will bridge the gap between the mobile and retail world, and will be a major driver of revenue.”
Read more…
~James Slavet
Congratulations to Rajiv Gupta and the Skyhigh Networks team, as they emerge from stealth and launch at the RSA Conference today!
The growing adoption of cloud services is creating new challenges in IT governance, security and compliance. Skyhigh Networks allows application owners and enterprise IT to fully embrace the cloud while retaining visibility and control – whether employees connect via mobile or from the corporate network. Skyhigh today announced the industry’s first solution that allows enterprises to know exactly which cloud services their employees use, and the risks those services may pose. Initial customers include Cisco, Equinix, Torrance Memorial Medical Center, and several other Fortune 500 companies.
Rajiv and I have known each other for just over 7 years, and this is the second company where we are partnering together. We were originally introduced in February 2006, by an executive at Oracle. At the time Rajiv was raising a Series A financing for his previous startup – Securent. In a very competitive financing, Rajiv picked us over other top-tier venture capital firms that wanted to invest. Rajiv and Sekhar Sarukkai (Securent co-founder) built the industry’s leading entitlement management system, and right out of the gate grew customers and bookings rapidly in the first year. There was strong strategic inbound interest from several companies, and Cisco ended up acquiring Securent in November 2007.
Rajiv and Sekhar joined Cisco and spent several years with increasing responsibility levels within Cisco. We stayed in touch and began brainstorming over a year ago re: new customer challenges around the cloud. Rajiv, Sekhar and Kaushik Narayan (a Cisco veteran who was Chief Architect of Rajiv’s business unit at Cisco) co-founded Skyhigh Networks with a few slides and a big vision – Greylock led the Series A financing (as the sole founding venture investor) in 2012.
It’s been a privilege working with the Skyhigh team over the last year, to start building what we all hope will be the industry’s leading cloud visibility and control company. Similar to Securent, they have instilled a strong customer-centric and entrepreneurial culture. The company’s cloud-based offering is called Skyhigh Cloud Services Manager and has two components – a cloud service that reads logs from Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Bluecoat and other gateways and provides instant discovery and analysis of cloud usage; and a cloud transparent reverse proxy that provides ongoing monitoring and control over cloud traffic. Skyhigh has a comprehensive and growing cloud registry that already includes over 2,000 unique cloud services, cataloged across over 30 categories, and the industry’s first risk assessment across these services.
While we are still early in our company journey, initial customer interest has been strong. The below quote from Brian Lillie at Equinix is representative of the customer challenge and the opportunity:
“We need a solution that helps wrap cloud services with the security, compliance, and governance we need, but without any friction for the business or the providers,” said Brian Lillie, CIO of Equinix, a global data center company. “Skyhigh Networks addresses these needs and enables me to become the Chief Enabler for the business.”
Gartner classifies Skyhigh as a “cloud access security broker (CASB),” and has recently published research on the need for and growing importance of CASBs. Skyhigh Networks was also selected is a finalist for the RSA Conference 2013 Most Innovative Company, and will be demonstrating its new platform and capabilities at booth #147 at RSA this week in San Francisco. The company is hiring across engineering, marketing and sales – if you have interest, please email gamechangers@skyhighnetworks.com.
Congrats. to the Skyhigh team on today’s launch and look forward to a continued strong partnership towards accomplishing Skyhigh’s mission of becoming the industry’s leading cloud visibility and control company.
~Asheem Chandna
Asheem Chandna is a partner at Greylock Partners, where he is focused on helping CEOs, founders and management teams initiate and build industry-leading companies that deliver new innovative technologies to enterprise buyers. Follow on Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn.
When we first invested in Nextdoor last year we were thrilled to start working with Nirav, Sarah, Prakash and the team to join the mission of connecting neighborhoods and communities everywhere. As we believed then, LinkedIn and Facebook have continued to thrive connecting people around their professional and personal lives, but there is a big missing opportunity to connect us more deeply to our local neighborhood. Or maybe better said – there WAS.
Nextdoor’s growth has accelerated over the past year with now over 8,000 neighborhoods, up from <3000 when we first invested. Entirely new kinds of interactions are commonplace within Nextdoor neighborhoods that you don’t see in other social platforms. We have seen countless communities coming closer together around urgent crime reports, sharing needed recommendations for babysitters, plumbers, or gardeners, and organizing support for someone frail or ill.
During this time we’ve also been able to work closely with the team to help them navigate this journey. Our talent team has seen and supported the growth of their strong engineering team. We’ve both worked closely with the teams on product strategy and Josh has become a virtual member of their growth team. These interactions have only served to strengthen our conviction in the thoughtfulness of the team’s approach to creating communities and balancing of safety and privacy for users.
Finally, the launch of Nextdoor 2.0 is the culmination of what we loved about the team – data driven, observations of actual usage, and building the product to support growth and great interactions. We LOVE the product focus of the team.
Between the impact that we’re already seeing Nextdoor have on active neighborhoods and communities, and the progress and rapid growth of the company, we’ve only become more confident in the team’s ability to capitalize on this opportunity. We’re excited to be leading the company’s latest round of financing with David joining the Board of Directors and are looking forward to working even more closely with Nirav, Sarah, Prakash and the team to build a long-term company connecting neighbors worldwide.
If you haven’t yet, we encourage you to join your neighborhood on Nextdoor and see what is just starting to happen.
- David & Josh
David Sze is a partner at Greylock. His investments include Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Seven, WhoSay, Nextdoor and Path. Follow him @davidsze and find his complete profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsze.
Josh Elman is a Principal at Greylock. Over the past 15 years, Josh has worked in product and engineering roles at some of the leading companies in social, commerce, and media like Twitter, facebook, and linkedin. Find his complete profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshe.
Reid Hoffman wrote a great blog discussing his views on software/technology disrupting the physical retail environment. A quick excerpt below and the full post here.
Retail Retailored
Software will not replace all offline retail, but will be used instead to transform certain offline retail experiences. Software can bring more customers to the stores, increase conversion in the store, reduce overall costs for the retailer via better analytics on supply and demand, and — for the customer — create a radically better real life shopping experience.
Follow Reid:
Linkedin
Twitter – @reidhoffman
~Reid Hoffman
