Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Former Twitter Platform Chief Sarver Joins Redpoint as Partner

Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s former director of platform, who left the company in May, is joining Redpoint Ventures as a partner.

Sarver joined Twitter in 2009, after working at Skyhook Wireless and, previous to that, having founded real estate startup Blue Trim.

He was tapped at Twitter to work on its partners’ ecosystem of outside developers, as Mike Isaac noted, “communicating with them on a regular basis about what is cool — and, more importantly, what isn’t cool — to do with Twitter’s data.”

Now his job will focus on finding presumably cool investments for Redpoint, whose current investments include Sonos, Twilio, Stripe, Infer and Curious. Redpoint noted that Sarver will specialize in social applications and platforms, as well as software as a service.

In an interview yesterday, Sarver said that after taking three months to “clear my head,” he was ready to think about what was next. He said that while he had considered going to another company, one of his many aims was to be a venture capitalist.

No! Really!

“I thought that I would do this later in my career, but when I got the opportunity, I thought it was time to dive into it now,” said Sarver. “This is a really interesting time in venture investing, and I want to not just eke out a 10 percent gain and work on bold new stuff.”

Sarver said he will be looking widely to do so. “I am not trying to be dogmatic, but it will obviously center on platforms, mobile, social and big data,” he said.

Here is Redpoint’s blog announcement about Sarver, as well as two other internal moves.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

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