The Greylock Minute | Winter 2017
A quick update of our recent investments, portfolio news, and partner perspectives
Welcome Josh McFarland!
In December, we announced that Josh McFarland will be joining Greylock as an investing partner. While Josh will officially join our team at the end of the quarter, he has been a part of the Greylock family for many years. He joined us as an EIR in 2008 and incubated TellApart in our offices. He built the company from the ground up, and in 2015, TellApart was acquired by Twitter for $530M. Since then, Josh has been Twitter’s VP of Product, where he led product for all revenue generating lines of business including advertising, data services and customer support applications.
Portfolio News
A selection of top news from our active portfolio
Airbnb has expanded their service and launched Airbnb Trips, a portfolio of offbeat excursions developed by freelance hosts. (Vanity Fair)
Convoy, a marketplace for short haul trucking, signs their biggest deal yet with consumer goods giant Unilever. (Bloomberg)
Discord, a communication platform for gamers, releases GameBridge SDK and doubles their user base in five months to 25M. (TechCrunch)
Collaborative design tool Figma adds Components, applying engineering concepts that make modifying design elements much simpler. (Figma)
Giving platform GoFundMe has now helped campaigns raise over $3B, with the majority of those funds amassed in the past two years. (NY Times)
The team at healthcare platform Grand Rounds is on a mission to make high quality healthcare more accessible to all. (Forbes)
Group video chat app Houseparty has grown to over 1M daily active users connecting people through spontaneous togetherness. (Forbes)
Lyra Health is addressing the important and often overlooked problem of access to behavioral health care. (SF Business Times)
Instant music video app Musical.ly, now at 150M users, is the first Chinese social media app to break out in the United States. (Money CNN)
Rhumbix, a mobile platform for construction, uses real-time data and insights to boost efficiency on work sites. (Red Herring)
Business Insider names Rubrik, Cato Networks, Gladly and Avi Networks to their list of enterprise companies positioned to boom in 2017. (BI)
Cloud security provider Skyhigh Networks founder and CEO Rajiv Gupta shares his 2017 predictions for cybersecurity in the cloud era. (LinkedIn)
Data wrangling platform Trifacta announces the launch of Wrangler Edge for analyst teams managing diverse data outside of big data environments. (Trifacta)
Greylock Perspectives
Some of the things we’re thinking about
Josh Elman argues that the shift to mobile has spawned a form of “shareable design” that has helped apps like Snapchat grow virally. (Medium) He also explains the “Home IT Budget” and discusses the next phase in consumer tech. (Medium)
John Lilly shares leadership lessons and talks investing, finding your tribe and the importance of a simple message. (NY Times)
Dan Portillo breaks down the important questions to ask yourself when evaluating an important career change. (Forbes)
Sarah Tavel presents her Hierarchy of Engagement deck and talks about how startups can create sustainable growth. (YouTube)
Elisa Schreiber interviews the investing team to uncover their biggest surprises from 2016 and what areas of technology they’re most excited for in 2017. (Medium)
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 winter we held 8 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
In our last Minute, we mentioned Josh Elman hosted #ProductSF in October. Since then we’ve published the speaker sessions, including talks from Reid Hoffman, Ben Silbermann, Alex Zhu, Sarah Leary and more. All talks are now available to the public on video through Greylock’s YouTube channel and podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher.
