New Year, New Beginnings
Leaving Facebook felt like jumping out of a plane.
At Facebook, I had the good fortune to work on software that touches the lives of inconceivable numbers of people, working side-by-side with colleagues who became dear friends. While there, I got to spearhead our mobile app revolution, help News Feed adopt machine learning, redesign products from Search to Photos, build internal tools, and even tinker with beloved traditions like recruiting and on-boarding. I unironically loved my time there. But as comfortable as I felt, I left Facebook in search of more.
Since then, I have guest lectured at Stanford, started blogging, and made over 20 angel investments. There was a common theme to the activities that gave me the greatest sense of purpose: leverage. Using my knowledge about building products and organizations, and sharing that across many products, many founders, many students, many companies, many industries. Not just teaching, but learning every day about new technologies, new problems and new solutions that I can turn around and re-apply in an endless virtuous cycle.
Joining Zetta feels like climbing into the cockpit.
With that mission, I knew I wanted to invest professionally. I chose Zetta Venture Partners out of a universe of possibilities because I see it as the best platform for me to support entrepreneurs who are defining the next generation of enterprise software.
Zetta invests early; we are generally the lead investor in seed rounds raising capital in the $2M-5M range. Zetta focuses on the “intelligent enterprise”: startups building products that combine software, data, and algorithms to deliver compounding returns to their customers. Today, it sounds practically banal to say that big data, AI, and network effects are the future of B2B software, but Zetta’s founding team anticipated the wave and made smart bets on pioneers like InsideSales, Domo, Clearbit, and Bebop. Zetta’s team are experts in the product strategy, infrastructure, and go-to-market playbook to build these businesses, and we understand what success looks like in the early bootstrap phase.
Zetta is committed to being the very best partner for early stage, B2B, data-driven companies, and that vision is a perfect fit for me.
As an angel, I learned that I love to be involved early — it involves more risk, more uncertainty, and more room to make a difference. I get to support founders in defining their product strategy and their business, and building the early team.
Angel investing also taught me that I prefer investing in B2B startups. I’m simply more excited about software that changes the way we work than software that changes how we play.
At VMware, I had the chance to transform the datacenter and usher in the cloud era, and I want to help startups with that kind of ambition. Inside Facebook, I’ve seen the power of big data to transform communication, connection, and advertising, and I want to help startups bring those technologies to new applications and new industries.
Looking ahead, I am excited to meet founders building intelligent systems for industries that Silicon Valley often overlooks — like manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, or supply chain logistics. I’m fascinated by how tools informed by data can help us build everything from better software to better cities to better relationships with our customers or employees. I’m also partial to the tools and data infrastructure that enable big data.
My New Year’s resolution is to meet as many founders as possible who have the ambition and the insight to transform industries. If you’re one of them, I’d love to meet!
