Greylock Partners Brings On Former Uber Exec Michael Pao As EIR

Michael Pao, who spent more than four years at the ride-hailing giant Uber, most recently as Head of Product on the company’s growth team, has joined the venture firm Greylock Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

Pao is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania who went on to nab an MBA at Harvard. Earlier in his career, he spent a couple of years in corporate development at Cisco. While at Harvard, Pao also interned at Quantcast and LinkedIn.

We chatted with Pao yesterday and, unsurprisingly, he seems to have learned a whole lot about online marketplaces at Uber, where he helped the company launch in Austin and Chicago.

He also spent 20 months as Uber’s general manager in Boston before returning to its San Francisco headquarters with the task of figuring out ways to help the company extend its reach even faster. (One idea he struck on: delivering ice cream curbside to users who requested it on demand.)

Like Greylock’s other EIRs — the firm typically hosts a few at a time — Pao doesn’t intend to stay terribly long, but he does intend to use the time to figure out a new marketplace company of his own to launch. (“It probably won’t be in transportation,” he says. “If I wanted to do transportation, the best place is to do that is Uber.”)

In the meantime, it sounds like Pao will be advising the firm’s portfolio companies and working closely with Simon Rothman, a former eBay executive who himself joined Greylock in 2011 as an EIR and was promoted to partner in 2013. Rothman’s area of focus: marketplace investments.