Greylock Partners
Greylock Partnersis a top-tier private venture capital firm, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $2 billion under management. Today, Greylock operates out of offices in Bay Area, Boston, Israel and India. Over the ensuing 43 years, Greylock has raised a series of partnerships, with current committed capital in excess of $2 billion, and helped build over 300 growth companies.
History
Greylock was founded in 1965 by Bill Elfers and Dan Gregory, joined shortly thereafter by Charlie Waite. Bill and Charlie had both worked at American Research and Development—one of the country’s first venture capital firms—while Dan was an investment manager at John P. Chase. The original capital ($9 million in total) was committed by a group of six prominent families, all of whom are still investors in Greylock.
Investments
Greylock's early-stage investments in recent years have included Corio, Xros (now part of Nortel), Sirocco Systems (now part of Sycamore Networks), Octane (now part of E.piphany), Red Hat, Phone.com (now Openwave Systems), ISS Group, DoubleClick, Open Market, Kiva Software (now part of Netscape), CheckFree, Cygnus (now part of Red Hat), Forte Software (now part of Sun Microsystems), Legato (now part of EMC), Trilogy, Clarus, Xircom (now part of Intel), Ascend Communications (now part of Lucent), and Copper Mountain Networks. Greylock has sponsored more companies to successful initial public offerings than any other early-stage venture firm, with over 125 total and has been lead or co-lead investor in most of these companies
Investment Areas of Focus:
- Consumer and Services: Financial, Healthcare, Internet, Mobile, Retail, Systems Integration.
- Enterprise Infrastructure: Compute/Data Center, Management, Networking, Security, Storage.
- Enterprise Software: Applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
- Semiconductor: EDA, Networking, Wireless
Funding
Greylock Partners is organized in a series of twelve limited partnerships begun in 1965, 1973, 1979, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2005. In 2006, Greylock launched Greylock Israel, a separate fund dedicated to Israel. Committed capital across the Greylock partnerships exceeds $2 billion. Greylock's limited partners include the nation’s most prestigious university endowments, major American industrial families and not for profit foundations. Greylock has had the good fortune of having all of it's limited partners participate in all partnerships subsequent to their original investment. Greylock's close extensive relationship with it's limited partners and their long-term investment horizon gives it the flexibility and patience to work with entrepreneurs in a highly supportive way, to build world-class companies.
Significant Investments
Some of the more notable investments include financing upstart adware/spyware firms, most notably Claria Corporation, formerly and notoriously known as Gator Corporation. At the same time, Greylock Partners has invested in the security side of computing, including database encryption companies such as Imperva, and networking product companies, such as CentrePath. Perhaps the most notable investment is Facebook.com
 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (November 2008) |
References
Ganapati, Priya. Networks Under Siege. Red Herring. Accessed July 14, 2008 from http://www.ironport.com/company/pp_red_herring_03-12-2007.html
Greylock Partners. Business Week. Accessed July 13, 2008 from http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=20767
Rand, Matt. Socking it to Spyware. Forbes. Accessed July 13, 2008 from http://www.forbes.com/best/2005/0328/bow001.html