$500M for Seeds | Greylock's New Pool of Capital for Day One Investments

Hi everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, Head of Editorial at Greylock. Today's episode is the audio version of our blog post announcing our new $500 million fund. You can read the post on our website greylock.com blog and you can listen to our other podcasts on SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the back of the accelerating transition to a technology economy and an unprecedented 15 year bull market, there is a surging sea of capital for startup founders. However, one thing remains striking. Capital is commoditized today, but true partnership is not. Thus, we're excited to announce we've raised $500 million dedicated to seed investing. This is the industry's largest pool of venture capital dedicated to backing founders. At day one, we strive to be the best bundle of early stage capital and partnership on the market. The most important reason Greylock is doubling down on Day one is so we can help a small number of extraordinary founders be more successful. The decision tree of a company has the most range at the beginning and we want to be there as a partner to founders from the foundation At Greylock, being the very first partner to entrepreneurs has always been in our DNA. We are willing to take true seed stage risk which requires believing in and backing special founders at the idea stage. Many of our seed investments and incubations, for example Workday and Palo Alto Networks, have gone on to become the most successful companies we've ever backed. More recently, over the past several years, we've made more seed investments than ever before. In fact, nearly 70% of our new investments to date in 2021 have been seed stage and our pacing has increased. We've made more seed investments so far in 2021 thanks than we did in total last year. Several other firms have announced new large seed funds recently. Our approach is quite different and gives founders a number of distinct advantages. One Team, One Fund we are a small, close, high caliber investing team investing out of a single fund. Unlike other multi stage VC firms who have announced separate seed funds, we treat seeds as concentrated core investments, not hundreds of loss leader options. Because partners make our seed investments, we must be highly selective so we can support companies actively. We are all investors in our own fund. Our entire partnership structure and incentives are strongly aligned with the success of the companies in which we invest. Venture Concentration Venture Scale Ambition Greylock is willing to write large seed checks at lean in valuations which gives companies more Runway to hit milestones without taking on additional dilution. Our typical day one checks range from $2 million to $20 million. We have long had over a billion dollar venture scale fund, making us appropriate only for founders with venture scale ambitions. We've been the first investors in 100 billion dollar companies. We are transparent about our scale of ambition and we believe we can also help a small set of founders realize the fullness of their ambitions. First Hires, First Customers, First Press we are active company builders at the seed stage. Our specialist teams support portfolio companies with their first hires, first customers and first press not with advice but with action. Our specialists are high context and high impact. We've helped recruit more than half of early engineering, design and product teams at seed stage companies. Enterprise Seed portfolio companies often receive dozens of customer introductions in their first year leading up to around 50% of their design partner and customer pipeline. And our marketing team has led the PR for many companies we backed at the seed, securing high quality stories and top tier publications when the time was right.

At Greylock, we are massive believers in the scale of technology opportunities across both consumer and enterprise markets. We continue to invest broadly in the remaking of the enterprise stack. SaaS continues to offer new opportunities including new verticals, new workflows, automation and product led growth. We we are witnessing the rise of new data platforms and the growing adoption of AI and ML for predictive analytics. Observability technologies continue to advance to enable the journey to the cloud and cybersecurity has never been more important and topical. With an explosion of innovation, we believe that commerce, infrastructure and fintech will change the economic landscape, improving access experiences and efficiency. We are doubling down on the massive gaming and crypto ecosystems and and we are always on the lookout for the next big thing in consumer social We've had a long history as network and marketplace investors and builders and we are eager to back founders bringing these models to new verticals. Transportation is at a tipping point. Healthcare is ripe for digitization and we are pushing those transformations along. Companies we've been involved with since Day one include Abnormal Security, wisetac, Rockset, Neva, Chronosphere, Instabase, am, Appiro and Snorkel. To learn more about how we help these companies with critical early activities like hiring, sales, pipeline and press relations, please check out the blog post for this podcast@greylock.com blog. We are deeply grateful to the teams who have invited us as partners on their journey. If you're a founder on day one, we hope you'll consider partnering with us.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. To hear more about the work we and the founders we partner with do. Please visit our website@greylock.com and subscribe to our podcast at SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on Twitter at greylockvc. I'm Heather Mack and thanks for listening.