As CEO of enterprise-storage provider Data Domain,あFrank Slootman saw a handsome $2.1 billion exit for his investors after EMC and NetApp conducted a bidding war for his company. Now he&'s joining the team at Greylock Partners as a full-time partner and will be bidding for a piece of the next hot enterprise startup.
Slootman will mainly focus on companies that sell tech to businesses, based on his experience in bringing Data Domain up from a venture-backed company starting with $27 million in funding. Data Domain was ultimately acquired by information-management powerhouse EMC in 2009. Since that deal was hard to top, he decided to go into venture capital.
a4ぎAIa4ぎa4m sort of in a situation where I&'m looking for the next challenge to put my hair on fire,a4ぎ Slootman said. a4ぎA(Venture capital funding) has historically been a game for people who had elite Ivy-League education, but not with a whole lot of operational experience a4ぎa4揩Ia4ぎa4m hoping to change that and bring others like [myself].a4ぎ
Part of that is because some startups in the enterprise space, like Yammer and Zendesk, are regularly oversubscribedあin their fundraising rounds and have to be a little more selective in which venture firms they take financing from. Slootman was brought on board to offer portfolio companies a little more security in terms of having someone with experience in the field as an advisor or board member.
Slootman said he wants to focus on companies that are working with increasing virtualization. That means pulling applications away from standard computers and running them on remote servers that have more computing firepower. The best model of that today is cloud computing, which can run anywhere from one to thousands of web-based applications and stream the results through the Internet.
a4ぎAThe enterprise data center is still very much where the industry is going a4ぎa4 we want to focus on mass standardization of the infrastructure,a4ぎ he said. a4ぎAWea4ぎa4вe trying to fundamentally separate the application from its underlying physical infrastructure.a4ぎ
But Slootman is not necessarily a believer in the consumerization of the enterprise, a belief held by some companies that new enterprise ideas should come from consumer powerhouses like Facebook. Yammer, for example, took its cues from Facebook when it created an enterprise social network and has racked up $40 million to date. Slootman said it was a niche market that probably wouldn&'t take off as quickly as other types of enterprise companies.
a4ぎATherea4ぎa4г nothing standardized about it, ita4ぎa4г like they just built it for themselves, but for some companies that might be a very reasonable way to go,a4ぎ he said. a4ぎAIn the lower marketplace where people don&'t have the critical mass to run their infrastructure, thata4ぎa4г probably the safest bet.a4ぎ
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Companies: Greylock Partners
People: Frank Slootman
Companies: Greylock Partners
People: Frank Slootman
Matthew Lynley is VentureBeat's enterprise writer. He graduated from University of North Carolina, where he studied math and physics, in May 2010. He has reported for Reuters. He currently lives in San Francsico, Calif. You can reach him at mattl@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @logicalmoron.
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