From Startup to Scaleup
By Greylock Partners
Today we are announcing our 15th fund, with total capital commitments of $1 Billion.
Our mission is to be the best partners for entrepreneurs who want to start and rapidly scale enduring, market-defining technology companies. The core of our business is supporting entrepreneurs from the earliest stages and helping them scale their ideas globally. We were fortunate to back Facebook, LinkedIn and Airbnb early on, and we helped to incubate Workday and Palo Alto Networks in our offices. In our most recent fund, 95% of investments made were series A or B, and with this new fund, we will continue to focus heavily on early stage investing. We are committed to supporting entrepreneurs along their entire journey. We call this “from startup to scaleup.”
We are at an incredible moment in time for technology. Massive secular shifts, including mobile and cloud, have created a unique opportunity for scale ups across all industries. We’ll continue to invest in consumer businesses that network people together (i.e. Nextdoor, Discord, GoFundMe, Medium, Convoy, and Musical.ly) and in enterprise focused products and platforms that increase productivity, unlock new revenue, and make organizations more secure (i.e. AppDynamics, Cloudera, Docker, Okta, Pure Storage, and Quip). We’ll also look for opportunities to back entrepreneurs who are building on emerging technologies like messaging, virtual reality, machine learning, and robotics. Given the DNA of our team, we will continue to view these largely through the lens of software, and apply our knowledge in these areas to help entrepreneurs scale up.
We understand the unique challenges that entrepreneurs face because we have lived them personally. Our partnership is small and collaborative because we believe that is the best way to serve entrepreneurs. In our 15th fund, we will continue to provide crucial services that we would have wanted when we were entrepreneurs: recruiters and executive talent support to make it easier for portfolio companies to build their teams, customer development to help fill the sales pipeline and provide product feedback, and strategic marketing and communications to help with PR and branding. We want to make it as easy as possible for builders to build. For example, Greylock portfolio companies make an offer through our recruiting team to an engineer, designer or product manager every other day, and our customer development team has introduced the first set of buying customers at most of our portfolio companies.
We are grateful for the small group of excellent university endowments, foundations and other organizations who have been our investors and supporters for many decades. Our continued partnership with our LPs adds incredible meaning to the work that we do. The returns we earn for our LPs help fund student scholarships, as well as important research and programs in science, medicine, arts and the environment. In this way, the hard work of the entrepreneurs we back carries forward into positive societal impact through our LPs.
Most of all, we want to thank the entrepreneurs who dedicate themselves to building important companies. Every day, we are amazed at the company builders who are bold and determined enough to chart their own paths. We are deeply grateful to the founders who invite us to share their journey, and it’s our privilege to work with them.
