The World’s Longest Recruiting Process: Josh McFarland is Joining Greylock as a Partner
by James Slavet
When you really want to hire someone special, sometimes you need to be patient. It can certainly take eight weeks to get a prospective hire over the line. In more extreme cases, it might even take eight months. Well, how about eight years?
The History
We first met Josh McFarland in 2008. He was an emerging product leader at Google, where he’d spent the previous five years. We were looking to add a new investor to the Greylock team, and we interviewed dozens of candidates. After multiple rounds of discussions with Josh, he stood out as the person we most wanted to hire.
I took Josh out for lunch — to go in for the close. As I was deep into my pitch, he gently interrupted me and said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought. I’ve loved getting to know you guys and I’m grateful for your interest, but what I really want to do is start a company.”
Well, as venture capitalists, we generally don’t make it our business to stand in the way of a talented person’s heartfelt desire to start a company. Our conversation quickly turned to how we might support Josh in developing his new business. Not long after, Josh and his co-founder joined Greylock as entrepreneurs-in-residence, and they got to work crafting their plan for TellApart.
The TellApart Story
We’re grateful that we had the opportunity to back Josh as an entrepreneur. The most rewarding thing about working in venture capital is when you get to invest in people who you really believe in and those people build something out of nothing, something really special from the ground up. The TellApart story is an example of just that.
Over six years, Josh and his team grew TellApart from a concept into a thriving business. TellApart applied cutting edge data analytics and predictive modeling to the field of marketing. In the time it takes you to blink — literally 100 milliseconds — TellApart’s technology can respond to an impression in an ad exchange, crunch thousands of model features and serve the right ad at the right place and the right time. And it does this hundreds of thousands of times per second, with great insight and accuracy.
As CEO, Josh established a unique and powerful company culture, attracted outstanding talent, and scaled a product and engineering-led organization that delivered outstanding value to customers. Josh and his team built a high growth, profitable business that was generating over $150 million in annualized revenue.
In April 2015, Twitter acquired TellApart for a publicly reported $530 million, the largest acquisition in Twitter’s history. Josh became a Vice President of Product at Twitter, where his role expanded to encompass product leadership for all revenue generating lines of business including advertising, data services and customer support applications.
The Next Chapter — Why Josh Will Be a Great Partner
We’re thrilled to announce today that our 8 year process of recruiting Josh to the Greylock investment team has at last converged. Josh will be wrapping up his work at Twitter in late Q1 2017 and will join Greylock as a partner soon after.
Our mission is to be the best partners for entrepreneurs who want to start and rapidly scale enduring, market-defining technology companies. Our years of working with Josh only deepened our conviction that he would make an excellent partner at Greylock.
The Greylock partnership is filled with entrepreneurs who have strong product and operating backgrounds; people who have founded companies and helped build businesses to significant scale. We look for partners who are high horsepower, high integrity, relationship-oriented, and focused on the long-term. Josh embodies so many of the qualities that we value as a partnership and that we think entrepreneurs should value in their board members.
He Has Walked In Your Shoes
Josh knows what it’s like to be on the entrepreneur’s side of the table. He has started at zero, and built something great from scratch. I can still picture Josh and his co-founder jammed into a small office, late at night alone, just the two of them, hunkered over their laptops, the walls of their office surrounded by shower panels that served as floor to ceiling whiteboards, filled with scrawling notes and formulas from top to bottom, reminiscent of a scene from Russell Crowe’s “A Beautiful Mind”.
From his work at TellApart, Twitter and Google, he has personally experienced the stages of building an enduring business — from pre-product market fit, through early scaling, through growth stage, through operating inside of a mature, public company. He has grown from a product manager who oversaw teams of four or five people early in his career at Google, to a founder/CEO and operating executive leading teams of four to five hundred people. He’s a product person first, and he worked hard to master the sales and marketing side of the business. He’s an entrepreneur who also evolved to be an excellent operational leader.
His Connections Run Broad and Deep
Josh knows a ton of people from the past fourteen years working at Google, TellApart and Twitter. More importantly, he is very well liked and respected, his connections run deep. When it comes to meeting new people, Josh is fearless. I remember being with Josh at a Stanford event in 2008 honoring Jeff Bezos. After Bezos finished his talk, Josh pulled him aside and introduced himself. Josh then talked Bezos through a few ideas he wanted Bezos to consider as next generation opportunities for Amazon. Josh had drawn diagrams in his Field Notes notebook, and Bezos said something like, “Most ideas are worth what you pay for them” — but then he asked to keep the torn-out page.
He Has an Extremely High Quality Bar
Josh has been blessed to work with some outstanding people in his career, so he knows what great looks like. As a founder, Josh pushed himself to learn and improve; his compound weekly learning rate was impressive to watch. This is a common pattern in founder/CEOs who scale up successfully and build winning organizations around themselves. He set an extremely high bar for the quality of people who joined the TellApart team. The recruiting process at TellApart was notoriously rigorous. Sometimes this made it hard to hit the company’s hiring targets, but the quality of the resulting team was outstanding.
He’s Always Collaborative, Even When It’s Not Easy
When you choose someone to be on your Board, you could be working with that person for the next decade. So it’s important that you choose someone who is a productive collaborator. You see someone’s true colors when they are placed under stress. Josh built and maintained a highly constructive partnership with his executive team and his Board, through the many ups and downs of starting and scaling his company. He did this by being open and honest, navigating productively through conflict whenever it arose, and staying focused on the long term.
He’s Truly Tireless
Josh’s energy level has been described as both terrifying and fantastic. We have worked with a lot of high performing people. But we have rarely seen someone with so much energy. Josh could send out his Board deck at 3am the morning of the Board meeting (note: not advised) and then show up at 8am for the meeting with more energy and excitement than anyone else in the room. Some people have an extra gear. Josh is one of them. You want that on your side.
He Will Make Your Life Better
It’s hard work building a company. It’s demanding and stressful. So you want to work with people who will help you make the most of the experience. Josh is a fun and inspiring human being. He’s not just into it for the outcome, he enjoys the journey along the way. This is a guy who turned an old auto shop in Burlingame into one of Silicon Valley’s coolest workspaces. He has made a tradition out of sabering off the tops of champagne bottles to proudly celebrate company milestones. He hosted a Jamaican bobsled-themed “TellApart-y” at his office — complete with a manufactured sledding ramp for the kids and synthetically produced snow (and somehow found a way to arbitrage the whole event so it cost the company very little). He has a great sense of humor, and a huge love of life. He’s someone you will enjoy spending time with. It’s good to have a Board member who makes your life better.
Please join us in congratulating Josh McFarland on his new role. We could not be more excited. It’s been eight years, but well worth the wait.
