Josh McFarland

Josh works with technical entrepreneurs building fast-scaling, enduring technology across fintech, commerce infrastructure and marketplaces.

Josh joined Greylock in 2017, and has led investments in Splitwise, Coinbase and two unannounced companies, and is a board director at Ribbon and Payjoy.

Josh is an experienced product leader and company-builder. In 2009, as an entrepreneur in residence at Greylock, he co-founded TellApart, a company that applied data analytics and predictive modeling to the field of marketing. Josh and his team grew TellApart into a $150+ million annual revenue business. In 2015, TellApart was acquired by Twitter for more than $500 million – the largest deal in the company’s acquisition history. He then served as Twitter’s VP of Product and oversaw all of the company’s revenue-generating lines, including advertising, data services and customer support applications.

The son of a coal miner, Josh grew up in Gillette, Wyoming and arrived in Silicon Valley in 1997, when the dotcom bubble was in full swing. He first began working with startups as an intern while attending Stanford, where he was a Mayfield Fellow. He went on to work at several startups full-time – including a few that didn’t survive the burst of said bubble – before finally landing a job at Google (for which he had to conquer a gauntlet of 23 interviews over 18 months before getting hired.) There, Josh quickly built his reputation as a product leader and helped found the Adwords API team, a project which won Google’s highest honor – the Founder’s Award.

Josh’s experience working within both rapidly-scaling (and sometimes rapidly-failing) companies, as well as those that became iconic industry leaders, shaped what he looks for in entrepreneurs. He loves to work with technical founders who are unwaveringly committed to their goals and open-minded to feedback.

“Great ideas are critically important, but you also have to understand how to put people together to achieve more,” says Josh. “Startups are a classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”

In addition to his work with startups, Josh is active in charitable organizations, having founded the digital arm and served as a board member at the gift and education nonprofit, Family Giving Tree. He enjoys teaching his two children outdoor sports such as skiing and snowboarding and is also involved in laser production for large-scale electronic music performances.