Greymatter

Audio version of Greylock investor Jason Risch's article "The Next Cloud Data Platform." As part of Greylock's interactive data project Castles in the Cloud, we've analyzed new areas of opportunities for startups. Platforms within the modern data stack pose multiple points of entry for startups to innovate. VCs are already looking for “the next Snowflake” – companies that find success in the shado...

As the saying goes, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." While running a business during times of economic and/or societal crisis is difficult, these moments can also pose opportunities for many companies. David Wadhwani, who is the Chief Business Officer of Digital Media at Adobe and a venture partner at Greylock, outlines his top strategies for staying afloat during times of crises. This episo...

There are a million different ways things can go wrong when running a startup. Most founders learn the hard way. Frederic Kerrest’s experience was no different. The early days of Okta, which he co-founded with Todd McKinnon in 2009, were rife with challenges. From flawed go-to-market strategies and missed sales targets to struggles with hiring, Kerrest and McKinnon dealt with it all. On top of it...

How do you advance society as a whole while still making sound business decisions? Kenneth Chenault, the celebrated former chairman and CEO of American Express who is now an investor and board director, says, "If you really are thoughtful, you should be able to have a better economic model by doing good.” Chenault is also the co-founder of OneTen, a coalition of leading executives coming together...

In today’s largely cloud-native world, having access to real world data is critical in order for organizations to derive meaning that drives innovation. Yet most organizations are still contending with inadequate tools that enable them to safely share, collaborate, and build with data. What’s more, many businesses lack the engineering resources to develop workarounds in the form of anonymized data...

It remains very difficult to build end-to-end products that leverage machine learning for business impact. Baseten makes it fast, seamless, and serverless to build scalable, user-facing workflow integrated apps powered by AI. The company just launched with $20 million in seed and series A funding led by Greylock. Sarah Guo, a Greylock board partner and board member of Baseten, spoke with co-founde...

This is an episode from Fungible Times, the Web3-focused podcast produced by Greylock crypto investors Christine Kim, and Mike Duboe, and Greylock board partner Sarah Guo. Sarah and Christine spoke with Chris Giancarlo, the former CFTC Chairman who is widely recognized as one of the most influential people in financial regulation. Giancarlo, who is known as "Cryoto Dad" for his father-like advocac...

The vastness of the internet, as an entity, can be difficult to put into perspective. Cloudflare, however, has a clear sense of its scope, as it handles roughly 20-percent of internet traffic. To frame it with another stat: More than 70 billion cyber attacks are stopped by Cloudflare each day. In this episode of Iconversations, Greylock’s Holly Rose Faith talks with Cloudflare Co-Founder, Presiden...

A re-broadcast of our episode featuring Obsidian Security CEO and co-founder Glenn Chisolm, whose company just raised $90 million in Series C funding. Chisolm spoke with Greylock general partner Sarah Guo and New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth in early 2021, shortly after the SolarWinds attack. In this conversation, they discuss the ever-evolving cybersecurity risk landscape and...

Google's first-ever SVP of Technology and Society James Manyika joins Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman for a discussion on the various ways technology impacts business, global economies, culture, and humankind. Manyika is a renowned expert in artificial intelligence, robotics, and globalization, and has been a highly-sought out advisor to many of the world's top tech companies. He spent nearl...

Greylock talent partner Holly Rose Faith, who works with startups to find, recruit, and place executive team members, outlines smart strategies to deploy when checking references. From having a plan of what you are looking to validate at the outset, to the specific questions depending on the role or stage of company, all hiring managers should go into referencing with a reliable, repeatable, forma...

In recent years, there has been a seismic shift in the way software is built, distributed, and adopted. Rather than relying wholly on a traditional sales-led model, companies are empowering their communities of users, and as a result are among the fastest-growing organizations today. That’s why Common Room developed a platform to enable deeper engagement with those users. Launched last year, the c...

Greylock general partner Mike Duboe interviews Mike Smith, the co-founder of FootworkVC. Smith spent the past two decades developing and scaling consumer businesses. He was an early employee at Stitch Fix and helped grow the fledgling startup into a public company. Prior to Stitch Fix, Smith spent nine years at Walmart, where he managed the company's multichannel business and oversaw operations. H...

Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani join Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman to discuss the launch of Tome - a storytelling platform for work. Anything on the internet can be easily embedded in a Tome, including Figma prototypes, Airtable spreadsheets, YouTube videos, Tweets, and Gifs. Users can play with 3D models and interact with live data tables that update automatically. With dynamic pages and f...

Another special broadcast from the Fungible Times podcast, created and hosted by Greylock crypto investors Sarah Guo, Christine Kim, and Mike Duboe. On this episode, Magic Eden co-founders Jack and Zhuoxun talk about NFTs, gaming, mobile, and Solana. In less than 6 months, Magic Eden has risen to more than $1b USD in secondary trading volume and more than 95% share of the Solana ecosystem. Greyloc...

More than half of the American workforce is paid hourly, and often work at jobs that must be performed in-person. Historically, however, this population has been left out of conversations about the future of work, and haven't benefitted from the significant technological improvements many other occupations have. Instawork is trying to change that. The flexible staffing platform connects businesses...

Greylock investor Seth Rosenberg talks with Espresso Systems COO Charles Lu and Chief Scientist Benedikt Bunz. Espresso, which just came out of stealth, is opening a new world of possibilities when it comes to scalability, decentralization, and configurable privacy for Web3. Greylock co-led the Series A with Electric Capital. You can read Seth's blog post about the investment and the transcript fr...

YouTube chief product officer and Google senior vice president Neal Mohan talks with Greylock general partner David Thacker about the dynamics of building, scaling, and governing one of the world's most popular user-generated content platforms. Mohan began his internet career at DoubleClick in the ‘90s, where he was a pioneer of the now-widespread advertising business model. He arrived at Google v...

Greylock investor Corinne Riley reads the essay she co-authored with Greylock general partner Sarah Guo entitled "BNPL for Businesses." In this essay, Riley and Guo describe the current state of B2B commerce, and the ways it lags behind the innovation in consumer commerce financing. The high friction associated with the use of checks and ACH that still dominate B2B payment methods – unstructured c...

Greylock investor Christine Kim discusses the current Web3 landscape. Kim, who focuses on a range of consumer technology and marketplaces, sees a future where blockchain technology is the underlying infrastructure (and driving force of innovation) across nearly every industry. Kim is also the co-creator and co-host of the Web3-specific podcast Fungible Times with fellow Greylock investors Sarah Gu...

The audio version of Greylock general partner Asheem Chandna's column for Forbes, "The Long Game in Cybersecurity." As the underlying technology of cybersecurity advances, so, too, does the cyber threat. Chandna spoke with four cybersecurity experts about how things might play out in the coming years. While each expert brought a different lens, they are unified on one point: cybersecurity has neve...

A special guest broadcast of the new podcast Enterprise Software Innovators, created and co-hosted by Abnormal Security CEO and co-founder Evan Reiser and Greylock investor Saam Motamedi. ESI features exclusive conversations with the world's top technology executives, who share real world stories of the ways they are deploying disruptive software in their companies. The first episode of ESI featur...

A special guest broadcast of the brand new podcast Fungible Times, created and hosted by Greylock investors Sarah Guo, Christine Kim, and Mike Duboe. Fungible Times shares stories from the builders at the forefront of Web 3.0. Tune in to learn about crypto, NFTs, DeFi, and the decentralized web. Not financial advice :) You can find Fungible Times on the following channels: fungibletimes.xyz https:...

In today's work world where remote, hybrid, and otherwise distributed teams are the norm, how do businesses ensure their employees are engaged and feel a sense of cohesion with one another? Enter Mystery: is the easy button for team morale. They offer fully-managed virtual team events with essentially infinite variety, hosted by a network of vetted experience partners, from baristas, to rappers, t...

When it comes to innovation, Twilio CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson has simple advice: "Build or die." Lawson straddles the line of software developer and CEO, giving him a rare perspective on the common ways the two sides misunderstand each other. It also gave him an early, deep understanding of developers’ needs in a software platform — which has been borne out in Twilio’s success. Lawson joined...