A year-and-a-half ago, Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar and Goldman Sachs banker Scott Stanford decided to quit their day jobs and start a new venture fund. That firm, SherpaVentures, has since raised $150 million to invest in early-stage startups. Next month they’ll be joining us on the Disrupt SF stage, along with SherpaFoundry CEO Tina Sharkey, to talk about how the new venture is going so far.
Pishevar spent a decade as a serial entrepreneur building companies like Webs.com, Social Gaming Network, and Hyperoffice before moving into venture capital and joining Menlo Ventures. There he invested in peer-to-peer marketplaces like TaskRabbit and Getaround, and also led Menlo’s Series B investment in Uber, well before it was worth $18 billion.
Stanford was also in that Uber deal, as part of Goldman Sachs, where he was part of the Global Internet Investment Banking practice. The firm invested about $600 million into startups like Facebook, Uber, DST and LinkedIn while he was there, and Stanford’s team also had a hand in pretty much every big tech IPO over the past few years, including Facebook, Zynga and Groupon.
In addition to founding SherpaVentures, the pair also created a digital consultancy called SherpaFoundry and recruited former BabyCenter exec and iVillage co-founder Tina Sharkey to run it. To date, they’ve been pretty vague (by design) about what SherpaFoundry is up to, except to say that the consultancy will be working with major corporations and brands to help incubate ideas and connect them with startups building interesting technologies.
All three will be on stage to field questions about what they have in store, why and how they were able to raise so much money for their first fund, and maybe even to get a little less vague about what the hell SherpaFoundry actually is.
We’re thrilled to have them and hope you can join us at Disrupt, which will be held in San Francisco from September 8-10. Tickets are now on sale, with early-bird pricing now through Sept. 1.