Welcome Sridhar Ramaswamy as our Newest Venture Partner at Greylock
by Asheem Chandna and Reid Hoffman
We are very excited to announce that Sridhar Ramaswamy will be joining the Greylock Partners team as a venture partner. At Greylock, Sridhar will initially focus on working with and investing in companies that leverage data at scale, AI/machine learning, and analytics to deliver the next generation of insights and capabilities for consumers or enterprises.
Our mission is to be the best partners for entrepreneurs who want to start and build market-defining, enduring technology companies. Sridhar exemplifies the kind of person we look for as we work towards our mission. We’ve been continually impressed with Sridhar’s drive, humility, and commitment to excellence at the highest levels. He is highly curious, and brings a learning mindset to all he does. And no question, he’s an extraordinary company-builder who deeply understands how to blitzscale. It’s a privilege for us to have the opportunity to work closely together, as he starts the next chapter of his professional career.
We’ve been hoping to work with Sridhar for many years. Sridhar and Asheem first met over a coffee at the Starbucks on Sand Hill Road one weekend in 2015. Since then, Sridhar has developed growing relationships of mutual respect with several of us at Greylock. We’ve delighted in spending time with Sridhar, which often meant hours-long, energizing discussions on everything from crypto and politics, to enterprise software and cloud, and the future applications of AI and machine-learning.
Sridhar comes to Greylock with an extraordinary set of professional experiences. In his role as SVP of Advertising and Commerce at Google, Sridhar oversaw all of Google’s advertising and commerce products, which included search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. In addition, he also ran the infrastructure teams that provide much of the software backbone for search, ads and other groups.
Sridhar joined Google in 2003, and he has been instrumental in helping Google Ads scale from $1.5 billion dollars of revenue in 2003 to more than $100 billion annual revenue run rate as of the 2nd quarter of 2018. During this time, he helped the business grow to millions of advertisers and publishers, and built the ads team from dozens of people to thousands. Sridhar also spearheaded the development of new and innovative businesses in shopping ads, travel, mobile, video ads, and app install ads that have contributed billions of dollars of revenue to Google and led the team successfully through several major pivots including the one from desktop to mobile. Today, Google Shopping, travel and payments are massively popular consumer properties in their own right. Under his watch, the ads team also pioneered many far reaching infrastructure bets in machine learning, (from the then largest ML system in the world launched in 2004 to the adoption of deep learning technology in 2016), storage (first customer of spanner, the planetary scale transactional storage system) and UI (earliest large scale adopter of GWT, Dart, flutter and others). His team also developed world class enterprise products in Google Analytics and Doubleclick for Publishers and Search, and Doubleclick Bid Manager.
Prior to joining Google, Sridhar was a director of engineering at E.piphany where he oversaw the development of cutting edge marketing automation products. He also held research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) focusing on databases and query processing on large scale data. Sridhar earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and his master’s and PhD degrees in CS from Brown University. He has published numerous papers on database systems and database theory, and holds several patents. He currently serves on the advisory board for the CS department at Brown University. Sridhar joined the Palo Alto Networks board of directors in 2017, where Asheem and Sridhar work together as fellow directors.
Sridhar believes that technology, when built and scaled right, can have a profoundly positive impact on humanity, and he is looking forward to working with early-stage entrepreneurs who also see the world this way. Sridhar has a passion for developing entrepreneurs to be great leaders and helping them take their companies through many orders of scale — -by acquiring new skills and practices to transform themselves and their companies.
As Sridhar noted, “I have been extremely privileged to have spent the past 15 years at Google, where I focused on starting and scaling new businesses and platforms. I have always been drawn to earlier stage entrepreneurial projects and becoming a venture partner at Greylock is an exceptional way to explore these types of opportunities. I am excited by the prospect of working with the amazing partners at Greylock and the great entrepreneurs that they have backed.”
Please join us in welcoming Sridhar to the Greylock team — you can reach him at sridhar (at) greylock (dot) com.
