Greymatter

Companies that have successfully managed crisis realize that how they behave in the minutes, days and weeks following a crisis is even more important than what actually happened. A company’s ability to successfully manage a challenging news cycle is paramount to maintaining company value.   While working in the White House during the Obama Administration, Eric Schultz was the person you wanted in...

In the latest Greymatter episode, we welcome back Twitter’s former Head of Revenue Engineering, now Greylock Executive In Residence, Wade Chambers. He sits down with Greylock partner Josh McFarland to discuss what characteristics make a great engineering leader and the best environment to foster leadership. Wade helped scale product and build out TellApart’s engineering, product, and services team...

The startup environment is chaotic. Resources are limited and the hours are grueling. But it can also be one of the most rewarding experiences for an entrepreneur. They must get creative and think fast when it comes to building a team that will excel in this type of environment. The same is true in a presidential campaign. Stephanie Hannon was the Chief Technology Officer for the Hillary for Ameri...

The rise of social network giants Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn paved the way for the world to connect online and showed the power of people sharing their own ideas, thoughts and images. Today, people share their personal moments billions of times a day yet these platforms are still largely considered asynchronous, meaning you post to your followers and they interact later. The advancement in mob...

Historically, there has been a clear divide of how to grow a B2B company and a consumer business. However, in the past 5 years, we have seen B2B companies shift from the traditional sales growth practice to techniques used by consumer startups, such as product driven growth initiatives, distribution through mobile App stores, free trials and lower price plans. Today’s leading companies like Atlass...

Engaging with customers is one of the most difficult challenges for most companies. With the growing number of ways consumers interact with brands — from phone calls, to texting, to social media messaging — it’s becoming increasingly hard for companies to aggregate interactions into useful information. Even today, customer service products focus on individual communication channels and treat custo...

We’re still many years away from computers being able to write and create content at the level that humans can. But today there are a number of ways we can leverage artificial intelligence to help us write and publish smarter. This is the belief of AJ Frank, the chief executive of Verst. AJ is a technology and product veteran who’s worked at Uber, Twitter (Vine), and Google (YouTube) before coming...

In this panel, Greylock's Josh Elman talks with Y Combinator Partner and former Airbnb Product Lead for Growth Gustaf Alströmer and former Uber Head of Product and VP of Growth Ed Baker about establishing a north star metric, growing in local markets, and how to measure the things that can't be measured. This panel was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hoste...

In our latest podcast, our Growth Advisor in Residence Casey Winters invites Eventbrite VP and GM Brian Rothenberg to riff on starting and scaling marketplaces. Brian has a deep background in marketplaces — he was a PM at Yahoo! for their local marketplaces businesses, founded a local services marketplace called SkillSlate, and served as Taskrabbit’s Co-Head of Marketing before joining Eventbrite...

Redfin’s CEO Glenn Kelman joined us at The Scaleup Offsite to share how his relationship with the board of directors has evolved over the year. He speaks from the heart about how to think about building a pipeline for your board, how to interview potential candidates, and how to leverage their skills and knowledge for the success of the company. This talk was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an ev...

Bringing on world class leadership is incredibly valuable for a scaling company, but executive hiring can be a long and delicate process. In this talk, Greylock Talent Parter Jeff Markowitz breaks down five steps of hiring executives, starting from planning all the way to making the final offer. This fireside was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by G...

The Rhumbix inception story is unlike most in Silicon Valley. It’s a story of two navy veterans on seemingly parallel paths. Before founding Rhumbix, co-founders Zach Scheel and Drew DeWalt both served in the navy, as a civil engineer and a submarine pilot respectively, and eventually crossed paths at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. In the summer of 2013, both Zach and Drew were working in...

Since its founding in 2008, Airbnb has changed the way people travel and stay in new places around the world. In this fireside, Greylock's Reid Hoffman sits down with Airbnb co-founder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia to talk about doing things that don't scale, designing for trust, and creating a company culture that inspires their team and community. This fireside was recorded at The Scaleup...

In the early days of a startup, founders can maintain control of company culture. But as the company grows, how can they ensure the DNA and values of the early team scale with it? Jason Kilar has worked at a number of iconic companies, including Disney and Amazon, before joining Hulu as the CEO and later founding Vessel. In this talk, he shares mechanisms some of these companies used to scale thei...

Silicon Valley is home to many of the fastest growing and most well known startups in the world. In this fireside, Reid Hoffman from Greylock Partners and Sam Altman from Y Combinator share their perspectives on how Silicon Valley companies effectively blitzscale, how to think about hiring when a startup is growing quickly, and why culture is so connected to the success of a company. This fireside...

Forming a well crafted communications strategy is part action, and part reaction. It’s about developing and telling your brand story in a deliberate way, while at the same time understanding the macro media landscape and thoughtfully responding to the narratives about your industry. Aaron Zamost, the Head of Communications at Square who led comms through the company’s IPO, has done an amazing job...

The term “brand” is often misunderstood in business. Many attach it to your company aesthetic — logos, fonts, colors, and website design. But thoughtful and strategic brand represents so much more. Few people in the world understand building and maintaining brands better than Heidi Hackemer, the founder of Wolf & Wilhelmine — a New York-based brand strategy shop that has worked with clients rangin...

Snapchat’s public offering marked the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Alibaba in 2014. This milestone has put a spotlight on the social media company, with public investors digging into their long term growth potential and path to profitability. One of the increasing concerns about Snap is user growth. While Snapchat boasted 50M new daily actives users in 2016, their growth slowed down considerably at...

We talk about growth all the time in the context of startups. How they grow, how they attract users, how they engage users. In this episode of Greymatter, two of the top minds in growth, Greylock Partner Josh Elman and Greylock Growth Advisor Casey Winters, talk about scaling Grubhub and Pinterest, starting growth teams, how to think about SEO, and optimizing user onboarding. The podcast is packed...

Demand for designers is higher than ever. Great products — the outcome of thoughtful design — are a result of stellar user experience. As design becomes a higher priority for startups, we are seeing a fundamental shift in how designers work. In this episode of Greymatter, John Lilly of Greylock catches up with Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field to talk about how he got started as a entrepreneur,...

Greylock's Josh Elman chats with Slow Ventures founder and partner Dave Morin about social networks, his experience building the Facebook platform, and learnings from his startup Path. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products t...

At #ProductSF, Greylock's Sarah Tavel is joined by Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann to talk about the evolution of his roles as both CEO and product leader at a high growth company. Ben shares how thinks about distribution, hiring and scaling teams, and what makes a strong product manager. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a commun...

Growth expert and managing partner at NFX Guild James Currier teaches us, in the words of the wise master Yoda, to unlearn what we have learned about scaling a business. He provides eight counter-intuitive examples for ways to think about growing and developing an early product. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founder...

dScout CEO Michael Winnick shares his eye opening research on how people interact with mobile technology. According to him, an average user touches their phone 2.5K times a day over 90 sessions, while a heavy user can reach over 4.6K touches a day in 300+ sessions. Another interesting point: apps owned by Facebook and Alphabet account for 43% of all touches. A lot of interesting data and insight i...

Nextdoor Co-Founder and VP of Marketing & Operations Sarah Leary talks about the journey of pivoting from FanBase to Nextdoor. She shares both the emotions and learnings their team took away from the pivot, and how they eventually identified the burning need for a social network for neighborhoods. Sarah highlights the importance of creating a product that is a “need to have” versus a “nice to have...