David Sze
Advisory Partner
David invests in consumer media, gaming and social platforms that have the potential to connect millions of people.
David has led some of Greylock’s most notable investments including Facebook, Roblox, LinkedIn, Nextdoor, and Pandora. He is currently involved at the board level at Discord, Nextdoor, and Caavo. He joined Greylock as an investor in 2000, bringing to the firm a strong belief in the promise of media, mobile and network effect business convergence. That conviction led to some of David’s most successful and surprising bets, and continues to guide his investment thesis today.
David has consistently been at the forefront of innovation in the consumer landscape. Prior to Greylock, David spent more than seven years as a product manager and developer for consumer internet, media and gaming organizations ranging from startup to publicly traded companies. David was SVP of Product Strategy at one of the first search pioneers, Excite and then Excite@Home. As an early employee at Excite starting in 1996, David also held roles as GM of Excite.com and VP of Content and Programming for the Excite Network. Before Excite, he was in interactive entertainment — in product marketing at Electronic Arts and development at Crystal Dynamics. He started his career in management consulting for Marakon Associates and The Boston Consulting Group, and also spent time at HBO.
David has been frequently named to the Forbes Midas List. He is a member of the Northern Lights Venture Capital Board of Advisors and oversees Greylock’s investments in those funds. He is also a Trustee of Yale University and Rockefeller University. He holds a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Stanford University.
Previous Investments
- PullString (Acquired in 2019)
- WhoSay (Acquired by Viacom in 2018)
- Vessel (Acquired by Verizon in 2016)
- Oodle (Acquired by QVC in 2013)
- Revision3 (Acquired by Discovery Communications in 2012)
- digg (Acquired by Betaworks in 2012)
- SGN (Acquired by MindJolt in 2011)
- VUDU (Acquired by Walmart in 2010)
- SoftCoin (Acquired by You Technology in 2008)
Portfolio Companies
Previous Investments
PullString
Acquired in 2019
WhoSay
Acquired by Viacom in 2018
Vessel
Acquired by Verizon in 2016
Oodle
Acquired by QVC in 2013
Revision3
Acquired by Discovery Communications in 2012
digg
Acquired by Betaworks in 2012
SGN
Acquired by MindJolt in 2011
VUDU
Acquired by Walmart in 2010
SoftCoin
Acquired by You Technology in 2008
New Edge Networks
Acquired by EarthLink in 2006
NOCpulse
Acquired by Red Hat in 2002
David Sze on :20MinVC
David Sze chats with Harry Stebbings about strong VC partnerships, pricing, and the evolution of venture over the past 20 years.
Congratulations Roblox! (NYSE: RBLX)
Cutting-edge game platform makes public market debut
Mike Duboe Is Greylock’s New General Partner
Our Investment in Roblox
Our Investment in Discord
Unifying all entertainment devices, services, and control.
Caavo’s mission is to unite entertainment for people and unite people through entertainment. Founded in 2015 by Andrew Einaudi, Ashish Aggarwal, Vinod Gopinath, and the late Blake Krikorian, Caavo’s technology is protected by more than 80 patents and patents-pending. Caavo Control Center is the first AI-powered smart remote + home theater hub that makes it easy to control everything connected to your TV with one remote.
DOMAIN
Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Series A
CURRENT STATUS
Active
INVESTORS
David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Andrew Einaudi, CEO & Co-Founder
Ashish Aggarwal, Co-Founder
Vinod Gopinath, Co-Founder
HQ
San Francisco, CA | USA
Your place to talk.
Founder Jason Citron and his team started their company, Hammer & Chisel in 2012. They were building Fates Forever, a new MOBA game for tablets, and were increasingly frustrated by the products they were using to chat while playing their favorite PC games. So in 2015 Jason and Stan Vishnevskiy launched Discord, a communications platform that helps friends come together around the games they love, and it saw immediate adoption and growth. Greylock partnered with Discord in 2016, and today the company has more than 56M monthly active users, with more than 1B messages sent each day.
DOMAIN
Consumer, Marketplace & Commerce
FIRST PARTNERED
Series D
CURRENT STATUS
Active
INVESTORS
Josh Elman, David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Jason Citron, CEO & Founder
HQ
San Francisco, CA | USA
The world’s leading social network.
Facebook is an online social networking service that allows its users to connect with friends and family as well as make new connections. It provides its users with the ability to create a profile, update information, add images, send friend requests, and accept requests from other users. Its features include status update, photo tagging and sharing, and more.
DOMAIN
Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Series B
CURRENT STATUS
Public
INVESTORS
David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO & Founder
Sheryl Sandberg, COO
HQ
Menlo Park, CA | USA
AI-first consumer product company.
Inflection is an AI-first consumer products company, incubated at Greylock. Inflection has a deeply technical and highly creative co-founding team with extraordinary collective expertise in building breakthrough AI.
DOMAIN
AI, Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Seed
CURRENT STATUS
Active
INVESTORS
Reid Hoffman, David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Mustafa Suleyman, Co-Founder & CEO
Karén Simonyan, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder
HQ
Distributed
The world’s leading social network.
With millions of jobs on LinkedIn, find one meant for you.
Founded in 2003, LinkedIn connects the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. With more than 675+ million members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network and leads a diversified business with revenues from membership subscriptions, advertising sales and recruitment solutions. In December 2016, Microsoft completed its acquisition of LinkedIn, bringing together the world’s leading professional cloud and the world’s leading professional network.
DOMAIN
Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Series B
CURRENT STATUS
Acquired
INVESTORS
David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Jeff Weiner, CEO
Reid Hoffman, Founder
Allen Blue, Co-Founder
Konstantin Guericke, Co-Founder
Eric Ly, Co-Founder
Jean-Luc Vaillant, Co-Founder
HQ
Sunnyvale, CA | USA
Everyone's stories and ideas.
Medium is a subscription publishing platform with 120 million monthly readers. It delivers journalistic rigor alongside insights from thousands of publications and diverse voices from across the web in an elegant, personalized, and entirely ad-free experience.
DOMAIN
Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Series A
CURRENT STATUS
Active
INVESTORS
Josh Elman, David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Tony Stubblebine, CEO
HQ
San Francisco, CA | USA
Instant music video.
DOMAIN
Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Series A
CURRENT STATUS
Acquired
INVESTORS
Josh Elman, David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Alex Zhu, CEO & Co-Founder
HQ
Shanghai | China
Private social network for your neighborhood.
Nextdoor is the neighborhood hub for trusted connections and the exchange of helpful information, goods, and services. Nextdoor’s purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Neighbors rely on Nextdoor in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Canada.
DOMAIN
Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Series C
CURRENT STATUS
Public
INVESTORS
David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Sarah Friar, CEO
HQ
San Francisco, CA | USA
Internet music and radio discovery service.
DOMAIN
Consumer
FIRST PARTNERED
Series F
CURRENT STATUS
Acquired
INVESTORS
David Sze
LEADERSHIP
Tim Westergren, Founder
HQ
Oakland, CA | USA
Next generation entertainment platform.
Roblox’s mission is to bring the world together through play. We enable anyone to imagine, create, and have fun with friends as they explore millions of immersive 3D experiences, all built by a global community of developers.
DOMAIN
Consumer, Marketplace & Commerce
FIRST PARTNERED
Series F
CURRENT STATUS
Public
INVESTORS
Seth Rosenberg, David Sze
LEADERSHIP
David Baszucki, CEO & Co-Founder
HQ
San Mateo, CA | USA
