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Talk:Greylock Partners

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Name origin edit

Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Of historical note, the company's name has its origin in the street that founder Bill Elfers lived on, in Massachusetts. Greylock Road, Wellesley Hills. Reference here.121.74.233.34 (talk) 02:10, 20 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

  Done , sorry it took so long.  :-)     75.108.94.227 (talk) 11:30, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Introduction edit

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Greylock has $2.1 under management and they invest in consumer and enterprise software - not semi conductors. Their offices are in the Bay Area and Cambridge, MA. All of this information can be found on their "About Us" page. [1] They didn't have offices in India, and their Israel branch known as Greylock IL rebranded as 83North in January 2015. [2] Esmilcsncm (talk) 17:46, 10 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  1. ^ http://www.greylock.com/about-us/
  2. ^ http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/01/06/greylock-il-rebrands-as-83north-announces-a-200-million-fund/
For Wikipedia a difference between 2 billion and 2.1 billion is not relevant enough for a change. I would recommend to wait this they have 2.5 billion under management. The Banner talk 21:25, 30 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Closing this request as 99% answered; the semi-conductor bit is covered under the pending request about investment-strategy. See also the checklist-section of this talkpage. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 11:52, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Info Box edit

Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion

Greylock Partners has $2.1B under management. [1] They changed their logo in 2010. [2] Esmilcsncm (talk) 17:49, 10 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

References

  1. ^ http://www.greylock.com/about-us/
  2. ^ http://www.greylock.com/greylock-has-a-new-logo/
For Wikipedia a difference between 2 billion and 2.1 billion is not relevant enough for a change. I would recommend to wait this they have 2.5 billion under management. The Banner talk 21:25, 30 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
User:The_Banner, can you upload the new corporate logo to enWiki-not-commons, per a fair use exception, please? They changed it in 2010.  :-)     Direct URL is == http://www.greylock.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/New-Logo.jpg 75.108.94.227 (talk) 05:57, 17 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, out of principle I don't upload images to ENWP. The Banner talk 09:57, 17 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
No apologies needed, I also don't.  :-)     Likely for slightly differing underlying reasons though, methinks. I get really annoyed by the inability to properly fiddle with bulk dumps of wikipedia, because so many articles depend on trademarked logos... I'm having a trouble right now with that issue, where some of the presidential candidates in 2016 have trademarked their campaign logos (and trump has trademarked his campaign slogan... which he lifted from reagan). Sigh. Anyways, no worries, I'll have somebody at the teahouse see if they can do it. I'm a stand-on-principle-type myself, but I'm also a pragmatist about the pedia; I don't think the tide can be fought by stalling, so I would rather see the tide be fought by loading it to the breaking point, to mix metaphors beyond all hope of recovering to a whiter shade of pale.  ;-)   Anyways, no prob. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:55, 17 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Okay, we are eleventh in the upload-queue for the new logo, WP:TEAHOUSE folks directed me to WP:FFU image-upload-wizard. User:The_Banner, are you against deleting accidental-copyvio upload-attempts, on principle?  :-)     Somebody already uploaded the logo, but mistakenly put it on commons as CCBYSA, which is incorrect. I asked the WP:FFU reviewer to look that over, so maybe they will fix up the accidental-copyvio-stuff. Also, they were using a promotional username, which should potentially be fixed as well, but I'm not sure what the username-policy is over on commons; might be different from enWiki? User:Esmilcsncm, are you the same person as this person, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Greylock_Partners , who uploaded the 2010 logo in July, or do you know who that was? They accidentally marked it as modify-and-reuse-for-any-purpose-by-anyone-including-commercial-use, which seems like a goof, to my eyes at least. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:45, 18 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

No, I just try to upload copyright-free pictures to Commons and nothing more. But failed attempts.... ai, ai ai. (If I recall correctly I have also made mistakes with uploading.  ) The Banner talk 15:16, 18 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Speaking of mistakes... looks like I just almost made one... here is what our local copyright expert says about the new logo:

File is already available. The version of the file uploaded to Commons at File:Greylock Partners Logo.jpg is not a copyvio, it is a {{PD-textlogo}} that is ineligible for copyright as it is plain text which is below the threshold of originality. I've placed that image in the article's infobox. Nick⁠—⁠Contact/Contribs 05:39, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Now, while I agree with Nick that the new-in-2010 logo is not something that can be copyrighted, I'm NOT so sure it could not be trademarked. User:Esmilcsncm, can you tell us whether 1) Greylock believes that the new logo *is* copyright despite the commons:COM:TOO stuff, and also 2) whether Greylock has, or intends to, file a trademark/servicemark/registeredTrademark/etc claim for the new-in-2010 logo? In any case, the article looks better now; the older logo is in the history-section, and the new&current logo is in the infobox. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 11:15, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Funding edit

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Greylock raised a $1B 14th fund in 2013. [1] Committed capital exceeds $2.1B. [2] And Greylock Israel has rebraded as 83North in January 2015. [3] Esmilcsncm (talk) 17:55, 10 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
  1. ^ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/10/facebook-linkedin-investor-greylock-partners-raises-1-billion-for-14th-fund/
  2. ^ http://www.greylock.com/about-us/
  3. ^ http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/01/06/greylock-il-rebrands-as-83north-announces-a-200-million-fund/
Sources I found confirm the 14th fund, and also the "rebrand" of the Israel branch (which is now concentrating on Israeli and European startups). Also confirm the $2.1B , and was at one point $2.6 billion or something (see sources below), so I agree with TheBanner that simply saying "over two billion" is enough accuracy for the encyclopedia. Is there a chart, or a table, which shows the average asset-size over the course of the company's history on a quarterly or yearly basis? *That* would be worth putting into mainspace, if it exists, and if it is sourced to more than statements made by Greylock itself... are they filing these fund-sizes with some agency or something, that is double-checking the figures are correct? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 05:54, 17 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Closing this request as 99% answered. See also the checklist-section of this talkpage. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 11:52, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Investments edit

Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

Greylock categorizes their investments into two sectors: Consumer Internet and Enterprise IT.

Consumer sectors include: advertising, commerce, gaming, marketplaces, media, mobile, services, and social.[1]

Enterprise sectors include: applications, cloud/SaaS, data center, management, networking, security and storage.[2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Esmilcsncm (talk • contribs) 17:58, 10 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  1. ^ http://www.greylock.com/about-us/
  2. ^ http://www.greylock.com/about-us/
What do you mean by that? Did they reduce their "areas of investment" or did they rename them? Do you have independent sources for this? The Banner talk 21:29, 30 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Ping User:The Banner, and also User:Esmilcsncm, as I understand it, the firm's focus *is* narrower in 2010+ now that Greylock is a west-coast-VC-firm, than it was back in the 1980s/1990s, when Greylock was an east-coast-firm. See cites below. Could not find many about the earlier Cambridge/MIT era of the company, most of the online sources are about the BayArea/Stanford era (HQ moved in 2009 ... but in 2000 Greylock was still primarily an east-coast-firm ... changeover began around 2004 w/ LinkedIn said one source, but was gradual). Their investment-portfolio is still the same, in the sense that they are early-stage-high-tech-VC-startups... but there are more software ones nowadays, whereas in the 1980s there were at least as many hardware-startups as software-startups. Anyways, I think I found enough sources that the article can be properly fleshed out now... mainspace has a bunch of flat factual errors, at the moment. Esmilcsncm's characterization of Greylock's portfolio-focus-as-of-2015 is basically correct (though I don't know of any "gaming" startups they have actually invested in). 75.108.94.227 (talk) 05:46, 17 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I was going to add some investment history and thought the bullet list is a little unorthodox. I saw in old revisions that some additional information was being added but maybe too promotional. So Ill work with the info in my sandbox to get it down to just the facts, but I think their investment history is worth noting as it seems to be well-sourced and more specific than just a vague bullet list, per WP:USEPROSE. Tiltedtonic (talk) 20:28, 29 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

To my opinion, the separate investments they do are irrelevant. After all, it is their work to invest. The fields where they invest are far moren important and they are already in the article. The Banner talk 20:56, 29 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
I added some of the more historic investments and technically all this could go into the History section but as the Investment section already existed and needed work, I added it there. I don't think the funding information is promotional --the article states that it's one of the oldest venture capital firms so including these details just reinforces its significance. Tiltedtonic (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
I fear we have different opinions and I reverted your edit. The Banner talk 22:12, 29 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
Well we do indeed disagree; I felt that the only reason this company is significant is because of its major investments in companies that have become billion dollar companies that disrupt industry norms. I feel like that's really the main reason someone would come to this article to read about why it matters. But I hear you and Im not trying to engage in some edit war Tiltedtonic (talk) 21:29, 24 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

sources edit

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

These can help satisfy the wp-coi-edit-request above. Note that Greylock *did* invest in semiconductor firms ... back in the 1980s and 1990s... but we need to clearly separate their various strategies over their history. Nowadays, they have a seed-fund (pretty small), some kind of university-student-oriented thing (not really an investment in the financial sense), and various professional-networking-events (somewhat investment-related). Their main business is early-stage startups, almost 100% software nowadays: consumer and enterprise groups, see refs below. Their "new" other main business is growth-stage funding, with their first such investment being in 2006 w/ facebook, and their formal announcement of an offical growth-stage-vehicle happening in 2011 (ir memory serves from refs below)... nowadays the growth-stage investments are relatively few but large in dollar-amounts (both metrics relative to early-stage-funds), about 40% of their total assets.



  • Pui-Wing Tam (March 2, 2011). http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704506004576174551486219660. Venture-capital firm Greylock Partners reopened its newest fund and raised its size to $1 billion in order to invest in fast-growing and late-stage technology companies, in another sign of how the venture industry is riding the latest Web frenzy. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  • Scott Kirsner (May 25, 2009). "Greylock's move west suggests local venture capital scene lags". After 44 years in the Boston area, Greylock Partners has chosen Silicon Valley for its new headquarters. The venture capital firm's Waltham office will remain open, but administrative staff will be in Menlo Park, Calif. - and the firm will add new investing partners there.
  • Iris Kuo (2011/03/01). "Greylock: $1 billion more and new fund for "winner's circle"". Venture capital firm Greylock Partners said today it would expand an early-stage fund to $1 billion and start a growth fund to usher in the next phase of its investment strategy. ...the conventional venture-capital model [i.e. non-angel-investor] as practiced by Greylock and a few other elite firms is still going strong. ... The firm said the expansion capital for its early-stage fund, Greylock XIII, was raised from existing limited partners and was oversubscribed. The company initially closed $575 million for the fund in November 2009. So far, that [early-stage] fund has backed startups like Airbnb, One Kings Lane, Pure Storage, Rally Software, and Shopkick. The new growth fund, Greylock Growth, is the next phase of the company's plans to executive a later-stage investment strategy, and it has been working particularly hard to mastermind social web opportunities. Since Greylock's initial Facebook investment in early 2006, approximately 40 percent of the firm's dollars have gone toward later stage companies, the firm said. The growth fund will be focused on later-stage financings in "breakout consumer Internet and enterprise companies," and will invest $25 million to $200 million at a time. ... In addition to the Facebook investment, Greylock owns 15.8 percent of LinkedIn and backs Groupon, Redfin, Constant Contact, Pandora and Zipcar (the latter two are filing to go public). ... The company also has completed 20 seed-stage investments since its discovery fund was launched in September, with $25,000 to $500,000 investments. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Tomio Geron (September 10, 2013). "Facebook, LinkedIn Investor Greylock Partners Raises $1 Billion For 14th Fund". ...raised $1 billion for its fourteenth fund. The new fund, which was oversubscribed, is the same size as the firm's last fund. It's the Greylock's first fund since it moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley from Massachusetts. Greylock has remained focused on early stage investments, unlike other firms that have expanded to growth investing. In its last fund, Greylock invested about 120 of its 143 investments in the seed or Series A stage, while 10 more were Series B deals. .... In addition to massive exits Facebook, LinkedIn, Workday and Palo Alto Networks, Greylock's consumer companies include Airbnb, Dropbox, Edmodo and NextDoor, while its enterprise companies include Cloudera, Okta and Pure Storage.
  • Parija Kavilanz (2015/06/26). "He's got killer instinct for hot tech startups". {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) ... Facebook, Airbnb, LinkedIn. post-2011 == Dropbox, Tumblr (acquired by Yahoo), Instagram (acquired by Facebook in 2012). Others == Quip (a mobile word processor app), and ClearSlide (sales management platform). "[partner since 2011, John] Lilly is laser focused on gamechangers in the tech arena...."
  • http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/12/greylock-partners-sarah-tavel-pinterest-venture-capital-diversity/71131846/ "Tavel will focus on early-stage consumer companies as well as business software companies for the high-profile venture capital firm which has backed Facebook, Instagram and Airbnb, among others."
  • Sarah McBride (Jun 11, 2015). "Venture firm Greylock hires first female investment partner".


  • Jordan Crook (Mar 20, 2015). "Meerkat Raises $12M From Greylock At A $40M Valuation". .... Meerkat (broadcasting app), aka Life on Air, Inc. fka Yevvo, "has closed on a $12 million Series B led by Greylock’s Josh Elman..." of which Greylock contributed over $9M according to an anonymous source, the balance coming from unnamed angel investors. (This was shortly after the startup raised $3.5M in seed and Series A funding during January 2015, but given competition from Twitter and Meerkat's increasing userbase, "a quick Series B makes sense.")
  • Leena Rao (July 1, 2015). "Greylock wants techies to schmooze more in person, not just online". .... Starting in 2014, Greylock began hosting gratis invitation-only face-to-face events in the Bay Area. As of 2015 there are around 1000 active participants, about a third of whom are currently involved with companies in which Greylock has an investment stake (a relatively small percentage compared to similar networking-events held by other Sand Hill Road VC firms), with on average around one event per week. The networking-events are organized into approximately 25 subgroups with specific technical interests, such as "design, big data, infrastructure engineering, user growth, data science, and network security."
  • Deborah Gage. "Venture Capitalists Pile Into Cloud Security; Skyhigh Raises $40M". .... Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, joined by Salesforce.com... $40M financing round for Skyhigh Networks Inc... control cloud services according to business-rules set by the customer.
  • Matt Weinberger (Jun. 24, 2015). "Greylock's Josh Elman thinks today's social networks make us feel more alone". {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) .... "Greylock Partners venture capital investor Josh Elman... live streaming app Meerkat — where he sits on the board ... private social network for your neighborhood NextDoor (a startup he advises)...."
  • Sarah McBride (Aug 29, 2013). "Greylock makes $100 million venture bet on marketplaces". Greylock has invested in several networked-marketplace companies, including Airbnb, ride-sharing service Lyft, and shopping service Wanelo.
  • Matthew Wong (Jul 23, 2012). "Greylock Hackers Show Top Engineering Talent, and Sleep Deprivation". ... In 2012, Greylock began hosting hackathons for university students, challenging small groups to develop viable products in less than 24 hours. The initial Greylock hackathon was held at the headquarters of Dropbox, with 160 participants. ... Other VC firms also have university student events, such as Bain Capital Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "[Greylock's] portfolio includes Airbnb and One Kings Lane."
  • 2014 , http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/13/how-greylock-partners-finds-next-facebook-253329.html , Sprig (new $10M investment), ... Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pandora, Dropbox, Airbnb (Greylock invested in 2009 -- five years later in 2014 the still-private company has millions of users and a valuation of roughly $10 billion) ... Nextdoor social media site funded by Greylock in ~2012 ... Redfin, real estate startup, funded by Greylock ... "Out of thousands of business plans Greylock sees each year, only 20 or so make it to a full partnership meeting [where the startup pitches their company to the Greylock partners in person]. Of those, only half get funded [aka ~10 investments per year]." ... Greylock does not make consensus-oriented investment decisions; through analysis of their pitch-meetings, they determined that the deals which all the partners loved during the pitch-meetings did not yield the biggest ROI, but rather, that the deals which some partners loved but other partners hated, were the ones that eventually produced the largest payback. In particular, Facebook, Pandora, Airbnb were all pitches over which the Greylock partners were strongly divided. "Each of Greylock’s 11 investing partners [as of June 2014] has either founded a major startup or was early into one." ... "...in 2000... the firm was different too. It was well known on the East Coast, having made a name for itself investing in Teradyne, Neutrogena, Prime Computers—many of the big venture deals of the 1980s and 1990s. But on the West Coast, [Greylock] wasn’t a real player. ...no one in Silicon Valley [including specifically entrepreneurs looking for VC investments] took Greylock that seriously...." LinkedIn was funded by Greylock in 2004 ... Facebook in 2006 got $10M from Greylock in 2006 (they passed on it in 2005 however). ..."competition among top VCs is fiercer than ever. Greylock's top rivals—Sequoia, Accel, Benchmark, Andreesen Horowitz—vie with it on just about every big deal." ... [as of mid-2014 Greylock] "has $2.6 billion under management." ... Greylock was one of the venture firms for Digg, before the company failed; based on advice from Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, among others, concerning how well the Greylock partners treated entrepreneurs in such situations, Medium founder (and former Twitter co-founder) Ev Williams selected Greylock as the startup's lead investor in January 2015 ... (( there is more that could be gleaned from this source... I stopped reading at the part where it says "...for Nextdoor. Greylock made a $15 million investment a little over a year ago, and since then..." about 2/3rds of the way through the source ))
  • http://www.businessinsider.com/greylocks-david-sze-reflects-on-investing-in-facebook-2015-7 , (( didn't finish this one either ))


Ping my talkpage if needed. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 05:38, 17 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

checklist edit

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Firm overview

  • task#1A, Investment strategy   Partly done
  • task#1B, Investment geography   Done(?)
  • task#1C, Offices   Done
  • task#1D, Employees   Partly done (see preliminary list of partners && former partners at bottom of 'sources' subsection)
  • task#1E, Capital under management   Done
  • task#1F, Add an infobox   Done
  • task#1G, Add a company logo   Done

Firm history

  • task#2A, Founding of the firm: founder(s),   Done predecessor firm(s)   Done(?)
  • task#2B, Add newspaper or journal references to new funds raised by the firm   Partly done (have refs for 14th and 13th funds, not for #1 to #12 though)
  • task#2C, Fundraising: Investment funds,   Done (listed by year), capital raised (ought to list this by year), fund vehicles (ought to list names not just years)
  • task#2D, Other historical items: Controversies, spin-outs, name changes, geographic expansion, etc.

Portfolio:

  • task#3A, Add newspaper or journal references to investments in portfolio companies   Partly done (see 'sources' subsection of talkpage, needs integrating with mainspace prose)
  • task#3B, Listing of sizeable or otherwise notable current or former investments
  • task#3C, Identify existing portfolio company articles   Partly done (see preliminary list at bottom of 'sources' subsection)
  • task#3D, Wikilink portfolio company articles back to private equity firm article, and add portfolio company articles to Category:Private equity portfolio companies

Requests by Esmilcsncm:

  • req#4A, Greylock has $2.x under management   Not done (prose-maintenance hassle... "over $2 billion" is preferable, until and unless the article gets a dedicated wiki-steward)
  • req#4B, offices are in the Bay Area and Cambridge, MA; They didn't have offices in India   Done (please verify current mainspace info is correct ... and if anyone wants to re-add the branch-office-in-India claim, please find WP:SOURCES that WP:PROVEIT first)
  • req#4C, Israel branch known as Greylock IL rebranded as 83North in January 2015.[1]   Done
  • req#4D, changed their logo in 2010   Done (but still making sure we have the legalese behind the imagefiles fully wiki-proper)
  • req#4E, Greylock raised a $1B 14th fund in 2013.[2]   Done
  • req#4F, Greylock [now] invests in consumer and enterprise software - not [any longer in] semi conductors.
  • req#4G, Greylock [now] categorizes their investments into two sectors: Consumer Internet and Enterprise IT.
  • req#4H, Consumer Internet subsectors [now] include: advertising, commerce, gaming, marketplaces, media, mobile, services, and social.
  • req#4J, Enterprise IT subsectors [now] include: applications, cloud/SaaS, data center, management, networking, security and storage.

I swiped the 'todo' list from the top of this page, plus compiled a list of requests-so-far. I've numbered the pieces, so we can refer to task#1A and req#4F (which are basically the same thing methinks). I've also closed the edit-requests that I think are done; the main one left open is about properly reflecting the current-as-of-2015 investment strategy (consumer internet corporations + enterprise IT software (never hardware?)). But we also want to retain info about Greylock's *historical* investment strategy; prior to Y2K they were an east coast firm that regularly invested in hardware-startups like Teradyne, which is where the "semiconductor" stuff in the current strategy-description-section comes from. Wikipedia needs to cover both the history of the firm, and the current stances (up-to-the-year rather than up-to-the-minute) of the firm. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 11:47, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

External links modified edit

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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