Scott Aronson Joins Greylock as an EIR
By Jerry Chen and Jeff Markowitz
We are thrilled to announce that Scott Aronson is joining Greylock Partners as an executive-in-residence. Scott joins us after working for some of today’s largest enterprise software companies — including VMware and Pivotal — where he built their go-to-market and distribution strategies. As an EIR at Greylock, Scott will spend his time advising our enterprise portfolio companies on their go-to-market, sales and distribution, and recruiting.
The success of any startup is determined by building both ground breaking technology and an effective go-to-market strategy for the company. Thinking through the go-to-market leverage points is where Scott Aronson excels. Prior to joining Pivotal, Scott spent a decade at VMware where he held various sales leadership positions in the company and helped scale the company from $40M in sales to over $4.6B when he left in 2013. Among his roles at VMware, Scott ran the world wide global accounts team that worked with the 50 largest customers in the world on their virtualization strategies. He was also SVP of global channels and alliances which was responsible for approximately $2.5B in bookings through VMware’s OEM partners, system integrators, VARs, and ISV ecosystem.
Jerry was lucky enough to work closely with Scott at VMware and found Scott to be one of the most strategic business leaders in the business. Scott and his teams were not only focused on sales execution but also thoughtful on how to introduce new products like Software Defined Networking, Software Defined Storage, Management /Security, and, of course, the products Jerry helped launch, including VDI, Cloud Foundry, and vFabric. Scott has the uncanny ability to understand a technology and translate it to solve a customer’s most pressing problems whether it be networking, cloud infrastructure, or application development.
When VMware and EMC spun out Pivotal into a separate company from the unification of Cloud Foundry, Greenplum, and Pivotal Labs, Scott accepted the challenge to lead the entire field operations organization and transform the business by unifying various go-to-market approaches into a single strategy. He had to move some businesses away from a perpetual license model to subscription model and figure out how to combine the sale of open source software with development services. Most recently, he was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Field Operations at Pivotal. He managed a team of more than 640 people and was responsible for all customer facing activity such as worldwide sales, customer success, channels and alliances.
Scott is one of the few IT executives we know that has worked at all levels of the technology stack, from IT infrastructure to apps. He will be invaluable to our portfolio companies, helping them think through their go-to-market and distribution strategy. Scott understands how to get a company from startup to scale up, and we are incredibly excited to have him on the team.
Please help us welcome Scott Aronson to the team. You can reach him at saronson [at] greylock dot com and add him on Linkedin.
