When you build and scale a massive business, you’re going to have a massive impact on the world. So when should you start thinking about whether that impact is for good or for ill? For many companies, “social responsibility” is a nice-to-have that founders and CEOs only consider when the business is established and profitable.…
Over the last year, I’ve had the chance to sit down with dozens of founders as host of the Masters of Scale podcast. Through these conversations I’ve honed my theories on what allows companies to scale spectacularly, and how these individuals realize their visions. For this week’s show, I had a very free-flowing conversation with Ev Williams, who founded…
I recently had the pleasure of attending an OpenAI event, where a number of academics, government types, and entrepreneurs convened to discuss artificial intelligence. The questions ranged from the changing nature of work, to how AI can play into international relations, to transformation of industries, to what the state-of-the-art is. Obviously, artificial intelligence is a complex…
Payal Kadakia thought of everything when she launched Classtivity, the precursor to the fitness subscription service ClassPass. She and her team spent 18 months developing an “OpenTable for classes,” building thousands of partner relationships and a beautiful website. Every time a customer booked a class, Classtivity would make money. But 90 days after launch, Classtivity…
Much of what I’ve been thinking and talking about in recent years focuses on scaling up quickly. But this week on Masters of Scale, I’m focused on a very different topic — how to reinvent a company so it remains relevant decades or even centuries after founding. Forget being a unicorn, and be a “Phoenix” instead…
One goal I have for 2018 and beyond is to increase my participation in ongoing efforts to make tech workplaces more diverse and inclusive. It’s an urgent and critical problem; one only has to read Emily Chang’s latest book, Brotopia, to get a deeper understanding what has unfortunately become the experience of so many women in tech.…
The startup world has its own unique vocabulary, filled with acronyms, slang, and colorful phrases. An uninitiated listener would be understandably confused by a founder enthusiastically exclaiming, “We’re crushing it! Our lower CAC proves that the dogs are eating the dog food!*” But the core prerequisite for scaling a new company is a common, simple,…
These days, when you talk about your “communities,” you’re less likely to be referring to a small town like “Our Town’s” Grover’s Corners, than you are to your friends on Facebook, or an Instagram group chat. Online communities have simply become communities. Yet while these new communities are central to our lives, we’re still figuring…
A review of Eric Motley’s Madison Park In 2005, Eric Motley decided to leave his job at the White House, where he worked as Deputy Associate Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel. Like all departing White House staffers, Eric had an opportunity to pose for a photo with his boss, George W. Bush, to mark…
In working on the podcast Masters of Scale, I’ve come to a perhaps surprising conclusion. There are no true “masters of scale.” I believe we are all, at best, what I call “infinite learners” — people who not only enjoy learning, but need to be constantly learning on the job. This describes so many of the iconic…
Collusion. Corruption. Covfefe. In 2017, it was easy to get distracted — and distraught — by President Trump’s Category 5 tweetstorms and the news cycles they drove. And thanks to the connectedness we now experience through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we often feel every newsworthy event with both apocalyptic urgency and a sense of fatigue that can paralyze us…
It’s hard enough to be a Master of Scale; to earn that title, you have to have both the opportunity and skill to build a world-leading company or organization. Now imagine how difficult it is to be a 4-time Master of Scale — in two domains that are radically different. That’s exactly what Barry Diller…
Today, I am excited to announce our investment in Entrepreneur First. At Greylock, our mission has always been to back and support entrepreneurs who are building disruptive, market-transforming consumer and enterprise software companies. We focus on early stage startups and help scale their ideas on a global scale. By investing in EF, we are both investing…
I’m excited to share the news that Michael McCullough, MD is joining Greylock as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Michael and I overlapped at both Stanford and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and I was a Marshall Scholar. But I only met Michael when I returned to Silicon Valley and he was one of the entrepreneurs…
Even with access to capital, resources, and talent, it’s incredibly hard to scale a technology startup. Just imagine trying to scale up a non-profit organization without the advantages of the for-profit world. Like the famous comparison of Ginger Rogers to her dance partner Fred Astaire, non-profit entrepreneurs have to do everything that their for-profit siblings do, but…