Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Greylock Partners Raises Another Billion Dollars

Greylock Partners is an old venture capital firm — founded in 1965 in Boston — but it has now fully reinvented itself as a Silicon Valley power player. Today, it’s announcing that it raised $1 billion for its 14th fund.

As part of its transformation, Greylock relocated its headquarters to Sand Hill Road in 2009.

This didn’t all happen at once — it’s the second billion-dollar fund for Greylock, and investments in LinkedIn, Facebook, Workday and Palo Alto Networks have made for a good decade. But Greylock Partner David Sze boasted in an interview last week, “The fund was raised in a matter of weeks, with the same LPs. We were oversubscribed so we had no new limited partners.”

Further, Sze said, “This is the first team that’s 100 percent West Coast, with a full lineup in different stages of their career, and the whole spectrum of enterprise to consumer.” He noted that recent investing hires included John Lilly, Josh Elman and Simon Rothman on consumer, and Joseph Ansanelli and Jerry Chen on enterprise.

Greylock is primarily an early-stage investor, and Sze said that of 143 portfolio companies from the last fund, 120 were seed or Series A investments. It’s not necessarily clear what Greylock’s next big hit will be, but Sze’s current picks are Airbnb, Dropbox, Edmodo, Nextdoor, Cloudera, Okta and Pure Storage.

Some trends Greylock plans to invest in going forward: Marketplaces (it’s explicitly dedicating $100 million to that), mobile, the virtualization of the server and the consumerization of the enterprise.

“This is the continuing elaboration of how software becomes ubiquitous,” said Greylock partner Reid Hoffman, also co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn. “The fact that you’re moving post-server to services and cloud in both consumer and enterprise. In some degrees, it sounds like stories of 1998, but it’s becoming much more real now.”

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus