Google’s former SVP of Engineering, Bill Coughran, has joined Sequoia Capital as a Partner. According to his Sequoia profile, Coughran will be making early and growth-stage investments for the venture firm.
Coughran joined Google as an engineering director responsible for infrastructure systems in early 2003, and over the course of the past 8 years was responsible for the engineering of Google’s search, client, geographical, and video products plus security and systems. As a SVP, he also served on the executive committee and was an advisor to Google’s Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt.
During his time at Google, Coughran had a ‘deep involvement’ with the development of a number of Google’s most popular products including Chrome, YouTube, Maps and Search. While Coughran was at Google, the search giant’s engineering organization grew from a couple of hundred to more than 10,000 across the world. Priot to Google, Coughran founded Entrisphere, a telecom equipment vendor bought by Ericsson. He was also VP of Bell Labs’ Computing Sciences Research Center where C, C++, Unix, Plan 9, and Inferno were created.
Sequoia was actually an early investor in Google.