The Greylock Minute | Fall 2016
A quick update of our recent investments, portfolio news, and partner perspectives
From Startup to Scaleup
We officially announced our 15th fund. We will continue to invest in consumer businesses that network people together and in enterprise products that deliver the next generation of infrastructure and applications for the mobile cloud era. We’ll also look for opportunities in emerging technologies like virtual reality, machine learning, and robotics.
New Investments
Recently announced companies joining our portfolio
Attic Labs is building Noms, a new decentralized database that makes it easy to store, move, and collaborate on large-scale structured data. (Fortune)
Cato Networks provides a cloud-based and software-defined network with built-in enterprise security. (Fortune)
Portfolio News
A selection of top news from our active portfolio
Apptio (NASDAQ: APTI), a Seattle-based provider in business management software for IT leaders, went public in September. (GeekWire)
In August, Quip announced it was acquired by Salesforce, enabling them to continue building out their productivity platform at scale. (TechCrunch)
AppDynamics Founder & Executive Chairman Jyoti Bansal is named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year in the technology category. (BusinessWire)
Dropbox, Cloudera, AppDynamics, Okta, Apptio and Domo make the Top 20 in the Cloud 100 list of top private cloud companies in the world. (Forbes)
Figma launches to the public and releases multiplayer editing, a new feature that allows designers to collaborate in real time. (TechCrunch)
GoFundMe, Rubrik, and Sumo Logic are named to the 2016 Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups List. (Forbes)
Social fundraising platform GoFundMe is ranked #1 on Fortune’s “100 Best Medium Size Workplaces” list for 2016. (Fortune)
The team behind Meerkat built a new group video chat app called Houseparty in secret, and now almost 1M people are using it. (The Verge)
Medium adds liberal site ThinkProgress to its growing list of publishers shifting over to their platform. (CNN Money)
Instant music video app Musical.ly is now used by more than 100M people as the team remains hyper-focused on reaching mass scale. (Bloomberg)
Nextdoor expands to the UK, its second overseas market. The private social network is now in over 112,000 neighborhoods. (Fortune)
AI assistant Ozlo launches publicly on iOS and web to help users find restaurants, discover recipes, order delivery, and more. (Inc.)
Rubrik raises a $61M Series C to double down on sales and marketing as the company expands into Europe and Asia-Pacific. (Fortune)
Greylock Perspectives
Some of the things we’re thinking about
Asheem Chandna sits down with RSA Senior VP and CSO Niloofar Razi to talk about the cybersecurity challenges of the future. (RSA)
Josh Elman explains why there are still many opportunities to innovate on mobile and breaks down the five types of virality. (Medium)
COO Tom Frangione writes about the key trends and issues that industry-leading CIOs are thinking about. (Medium)
Reid Hoffman joins Charlie Rose to talk about the future of tech: marketplaces, AI, big data and privacy. (Charlie Rose)
John Lilly says we’re in the golden age of productivity software and writes about why he’s excited for Figma’s multi-player feature. (Medium)
Talent Partner Dan Portillo chats with Twitter Head of Revenue Engineering Wade Chambers to outline the art of interviewing 10x engineers. (TechCrunch)
Sarah Tavel analyzes the unique financial pain points many young Americans face and explains why fintech is ripe for disruption. (Medium)
Team News
Saam Motamedi has joined the enterprise team as an investor, where he will focus on helping identify new investments in applications, big data, artificial intelligence and vertical SaaS. (Medium)
Enterprise investor Sarah Guo was named to the LinkedIn Next Wave list for top professionals under 35 who are transforming industries. (LinkedIn)
Greylock Programs
Greylock continues to develop unique programs and events centered around sharing information and connecting our portfolio and extended network. Below are some of the events we’ve hosted this quarter:
Greylock Communities
Over the summer we held 11 community events. Our curated communities cover a range of topics, from key functions such as growth, product management, and data analytics to broader industries like insurance and VR.
#ProductSF
This month we held #ProductSF at The Pearl in San Francisco. The all day event brought prominent founders, PMs, and designers together for a day of product-focused learning and networking. Speaker sessions will be widely available on podcast and video in the next few weeks.
Women in TechCrunch
For the past two years we’ve teamed up with TechCrunch to host a networking event for female founders leading into the annual Disrupt SF conference. This time, we also held office hours for female founders to connect with our investment team and share their products.
Greylock Hackfest
Our annual university hackathon took place at Facebook HQ this year. We welcomed 180 students to compete for a grand prize of $10K. The winning team from MIT built a clever hack that combines $1 of hardware with computer vision algorithms to turn any laptop screen into a touchscreen.
Greylock Techfair
Another one of our university events is Techfair, a career fair where we connect top university talent to 45+ of the hottest startups. We intentionally keep this event small and invite engineers from companies to participate so the students can interact with employees who are building and shipping product.
