Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Greylock Partners is announcing today that it’s added a new face to its roster of general partners: Joseph Ansanelli, a longtime tech industry entrepreneur.
Though Greylock may be best known at the moment for its recent investments in the consumer Internet space, and Ansanelli’s latest startup was a consumer-focused play (a recently shuttered photo-sharing startup called ZangZing), as a general partner at Greylock he will be focused squarely on the enterprise space. It’s an area in which Ansanelli has a lot of expertise from earlier in his career, when he built and sold startups specializing in security and connectivity technologies.
Enterprise doesn’t always garner the sexiest of headlines, but companies in the sector are certainly seeing success at the bottom line: Palo Alto Networks just had a very healthy initial public offering, Box is said to be entertaining a billion-dollar-plus valuation, and of course Yammer recently sold to Microsoft for a pretty penny. So it makes sense that a firm like Greylock is looking to add to its expertise there.
We sat down with Ansanelli in our TechCrunch TV studio this week to hear a bit more about his new gig. Watch the video embedded above to learn why he decided to make the leap from entrepreneur to full-time investor, why he went the standard VC route instead of being an individual angel investor, and what he looks for in startups and entrepreneurs.
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events. Such companies include Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Tellabs,...
Joseph is a Partner at Greylock focused on investing in enterprise applications, security and storage as well as new emerging mobile applications. Prior to joining Greylock, Joseph spent the majority of his career as an entrepreneur. He was CEO and co-founded several companies including Vontu, which was acquired by Symantec in November 2007 for $350 million. Prior to Vontu, Joseph co-founded and was CEO of Connectify which was acquired by Kana and subsequently went public in 1999. Joseph also...
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