Seth joined Greylock in 2017, following a career as a product manager at Facebook, where he led the launch of Messenger as a standalone app. While controversial at the time, Messenger grew to be one of the few apps globally used by over 1 billion people every month.
Growing up in Winnipeg — a “Midwestern” Canadian town with few large corporations – entrepreneurship (albeit, in more traditional industries) drove outlier success.
“Role models included immigrants who came to Winnipeg from Italy to drive trucks, who then went on to build the largest private trucking company in North America,” says Seth.
“Technology is the entrepreneurial opportunity of our generation.”
In this spirit, when one of the National newspapers stopped distributing in Winnipeg, Seth and his partner struck a deal with the Toronto HQ to secure exclusive distribution rights – and eventually published their own paper. Aspiring for more than a local Prairie news empire, Seth joined Goldman Sachs in New York, where he worked in Technology and Media investment banking and helped take companies such as RetailMeNot and Intelsat public. While at Goldman, Seth joined a small dinner to recruit Product Managers for Facebook. After evenings learning to code by night while investment banking by day, he joined Facebook. Seth was one of the first Product Managers for Messenger, leading the separation into its own app, and then the business and developer platform. Seth holds eight messaging-based patents, including the algorithm behind who can slide into your DMs.
Since joining Greylock, Seth has been instrumental to the firm’s investments across fintech, media, and gaming. He serves as a board director at Tome, Espresso, and Pine, a board observer at Payjoy and Wisetack, and was a former board observer for Roblox. He sees opportunities to reshape the way consumers interact with financial technology.
“Financial services have become a larger part of the economy, but they are intentionally opaque,” says Seth. “I’m interested in ways we can use technology for finance to do its intended job – act as an accelerant and infrastructure to our economy while reducing wasteful fees.” (Read More)
Seth is also passionate about mental health, and volunteers 4-hours per week at the San Francisco Suicide Prevention Hotline.