Power to the Person
If you don’t take risks, your career is more at risk than if you do.
My parents were immigrants from Greece. I heard a lot about civil war and how you can lose all the money in your bank account overnight.
Everything I’ve tried to do in tech has focused on taking power away from governments and corporations and giving power to individuals.
CRV invested in Twitter’s seed round.
I could tell the founders wanted to do something big, and giving people the ability to broadcast to the masses felt like a powerful idea.
I got really excited about the human component of it.
It’s become cool to say you’re disrupting the world, but I think helping people is a good thing.
I’ve always believed the best and most durable brands are both consumer and enterprise.
When David Sacks started Yammer, he wanted to empower people to work closely together.
I knew people and companies hated email and that people wanted to communicate in a simple way.
In 2008, the bottoms-up go-to-market strategy was still new.
Yammer empowered individuals to work the way they wanted to.
People started using the product and sooner or later it led to a revolt where the CIO had to buy the product for everyone.
I love working with founders who are human centric and live to improve the human experience.
From the beginning, PillPack was about making people’s lives better.
People older than 50 take more than three prescription medications every day. PillPack makes it easy to manage. They sort the pills and put them into packages with labels like “Monday 8am.”
I had a serious health scare a few years ago. It gave me an awareness of how much control our health has over our lives, and how little of the healthcare process we have control over.
I was a nerdy kid: programming machines in assembly language, rewriting the Apple DOS and making free long distance phone calls.
When I was a student at MIT, I worked as an intern for Apple in Silicon Valley.
Later, I co-founded a couple of companies; one didn’t make it; one got acquired. I joined Mohr Davidow in 1995.
In 1999 I became a founding investor of Shutterfly, a website for uploading and printing digital photos. Our mission was to empower human connection through photo sharing.
Shutterfly became a popular way to bond over shared memories. The company went public in 2006.
In 2004, I joined CRV; I wanted to contribute to a human-centric culture that could live beyond us, and support founders of companies that help people live better lives.
