Greylock Partners’ Asheem Chandna on First-Check Investing, Founders, and the Age of AI

**Asheem Chandna** (0:00)
Almost anything we invest in in that first track, normally there's no product market split. There's also nothing more than one person sitting in the conference room with us, right? There wasn't even a single slide in any of those companies, right? So there are very large rounds done, very competitive financing, but very high caliber people.

**Peter High** (0:22)
Welcome to Technoventure. I'm your host, Peter High. My guest today is Asheem Chandna. Asheem is a general partner at Greylock Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms founded in 1965 Over 80% of the company's investments are the first check, pre-seed, seed or series A. Asheem joined the company in 2003, and he prides himself on being able to draw on experiences to relate equally to engineers, salespeople and customers. And having known him for some time, I can say that among his many gifts is an ability to synthesize complex topics to make them more broadly understood and embraced. Asheem has been an early, if not the first investor in a remarkable set of companies, such as Palo Alto Networks, AppDynamics, Sumo Logic, Abnormal AI, Rubrik, Aruba Networks, Imperva and Sky High Networks, just to name a few. I'm pleased to welcome him to Technoventure. Asheem, thanks for joining me today.

**Asheem Chandna** (1:12)
Thanks so much for having me, Peter. It's a privilege to be here and thanks for that very kind interruption.

**Peter High** (1:17)
Oh, thank you so much. The honor is certainly mine. Well, maybe you can, I think many people who would be listening to this or watching this would know Greylock, but certainly they don't know as well as you do. I wonder if you could take a quick moment and talk a bit about where you as a firm focus and how you differentiate yourself in the venture capital industry.

**Asheem Chandna** (1:36)
Yeah, sure. So, Greylock is one of the oldest firms in venture. We're actually going to be 60 years old later this year.
The firm began 60 years ago in 1965 in the Boston area. Today, we're primarily a Bay Area based firm. And as you mentioned, Peter, we're really focused on what folks would call early stage venture investing. So, and preferably in the very first round, a company raises in a product called the seed round or in the second round called the Series A, we will selectively do some later stage investments as well. But our primary focus is really on those early rounds. And ideally be the first check that a founder raises. I think what really differentiates us is, the analogy I like to use is like a building a house or building a building. It's hard to build a skyscraper unless you get the foundation right. And just because you get the foundation right doesn't mean you will build a skyscraper. But if you don't have the foundation laid correctly, you won't have the opportunity to really build that skyscraper out. So what we like to do is work with entrepreneurs on day one, help them build the foundation of their company, help them build the foundation in a way that they actually do have the potential to build something very, very large over the years. And so that really comes down to picking the right starting point and the right strategy and really thinking about that, being a core partner to the founder, to the founding team, strategy and being very particular on where one starts, what the insertion strategy is. The next piece is really recruiting. So a lot of folks would say, if you look at an early company, you look at the first five, 10, 20 employees, that tells you a lot about the company and the company's potential because that early set of employees, you want to keep the bar very, very high and attract a very high caliber team. And if you can really pull that off and do that collectively, do that correctly, then you've set yourself up for success and you've set the culture of the bar in a particular way. And the flip of the spots, if you mess all that up, it's very hard for you to build a high caliber company. So it's really the strategy that it's the recruiting of the early team, and then the other piece of the one particular enterprise companies, very focused customer development. So these are some of the things that there isn't a bit of a craft around, and these things take time to kind of work on in a systematic way. And it is work that we pride ourselves on doing. Our team is comprised of people that are doing this work. And also what it means is we tend to be much more selective in the number of investments we write every year. So we meet with thousands of companies every year, but we're probably just funding maybe 10 to 15 companies at an early stage every year.