Greymatter

With Airbnb’s IPO, I thought the time was right to take a look back at the past decade (Greylock led Airbnb’s Series A in November 2010) and reflect on what I learned from the journey. This essay is based on a Greymatter podcast episode.

We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Gretel, an open platform that enables developers to build quickly with data and safely share it with others. Gretel aspires to be the GitHub of data. The team believes that privacy is an engineering problem and is on a mission to solve it.

Here in the U.S. the finance sector, we’ve seen a boom in consumer financial technology companies that modernize the way people save, spend, and invest. Yet in neighboring Canada, the consumer financial sector continues to largely be dominated by a handful of legacy financial institutions. These institutions haven’t changed much in decades -- they have high costs, opaque fee structures, and have been slow to leverage technology to modernize the way they engage customers. 

Too often, the conventional wisdom imparted to entrepreneurs is to treat board meetings as a necessary evil, part of the price you pay for raising money. While it's true that many boards are dysfunctional, when you build a great startup board, it will be a powerful tool that can help the CEO make the company successful. Reid Hoffman shares insights from his career as an entrepreneur, investor, and board member.

Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman in conversation with Harry Stebbings, host of the popular podcast The 20 Minute VC. Picking back up from a conversation in November 2020, Reid and Harry source questions from Twitter to discuss everything from Reid's earliest lessons as a young entrepreneur; investing in startups such as Airbnb; and up into the current environment of navigating political issues (and a pandemic )while running a company.

Cloud native is the new order of business. But most existing monitoring technology is insufficient to contend with the complex, dynamic, and ephemeral nature of the modern cloud environment. That's why Martin Mao and Rob Skillington formed Chronosphere, a purpose-built platform to monitor cloud-native infrastructure and apps and enable organizations to make precise, data-driven decisions.

Modern technology is one of the greatest opportunities for wealth creation— with most of the financial returns accruing to the founders, early employees and investors in the breakout startups from each generation.  However, Black, Latinx, and Native American people have been largely shut out of participating in tech startups and venture capital.

We are thrilled to announce that Mike Duboe has been promoted to general partner at Greylock. Today, more than ever, technology is touching every aspect of consumers’ lives. We’re excited to have Mike helping entrepreneurs who are building the next generation of commerce, marketplaces, and network-oriented businesses.

At Greylock, our mission is to help realize rare potential. To do this well, we believe it’s essential to be trusted partners to entrepreneurs at every stage — from idea to IPO. We are committed to supporting entrepreneurs along their entire journey.