![]() It’s this emotional intelligence that has enabled him to foster strong relationships throughout the valley, which he says are just as important as big ideas when it comes to building great companies. “I’m an economics undergrad, so I don’t rely on technology IQ,” he says. In addition to building the firm, Barry specializes in information technology infrastructure with a focus on analytic platforms, cloud, networking, and emerging infrastructure.Īnd yet, he insists technology isn’t his strong suit. It was here, in early 2005, that he and Chris, along with Ravi Mhatre and Peter Nieh, set out to found Lightspeed. After grad school, Barry worked in M&A at Cisco Systems, in San Jose, and later, by the recommendation of his old friend and classmate Chris Schaepe, became a partner at Weiss, Peck & Greer. And although he attended undergrad at UCLA, he soon returned to the valley to earn an MBA at Stanford. You need to be an early mover into new markets in order to build a leadership position.Īs a co-founder of Lightspeed, Barry is something of a Silicon Valley pioneer.Īfter all, as a native of Sunnyvale, he remembers when the area was filled not with startups but with cherry and apricot orchards. He previously led investments in Nimble Storage (Public, NMBL), Pliant Technology (acquired by Sandisk), Calista Technologies (acquired by MSFT), Arbor Networks (acquired by DHR), Growth Networks (acquired by CSCO), Maker Communications (Public, acquired post-IPO by CNXT), Memoir Systems (acquired by CSCO), Metasolv Software (Public, acquired post-IPO by ORCL), Sirocco Systems (acquired by SCMR), and Telogy Networks (acquired by TI).As a venture firm, uncertain times create the best opportunity to gain market share. He is a board member of Avi Networks, Dremio, MapR Technologies, Mosaixsoft, and Parsable. ![]() He has 18 years of venture capital experience, 10 years of operating experience and has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top 100 investors multiple times. )īarry is a founding partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners and focuses primarily on information technology infrastructure, with a specific interest in big data, cloud, IoT, networking, and storage. (Read everything you wanted to know about narwhals but were afraid to ask courtesy of Wikipedia. And as a general partner, there’s no comparison – narwhals are the ultimate achievement. Having just completed our latest fundraising at Lightspeed, I can tell you that our limited partners greatly prefer narwhals to unicorns (especially when narwhals are distributed). Rather than list unicorns, VCs should highlight their realized portfolio of narwhals. Narwhals travel in packs, often referred to as portfolios. ![]() Instead of tracking imaginary unicorns, shouldn’t CB Insights, Forbes, and other publications be tracking narwhals? (This might reduce some of the subjective nature of their popular lists.) Narwhals are very easy to identify - must be the tusk. If companies with an unrealized value over a billion dollars are called unicorns, then why don’t we refer to companies that have realized outcomes over a billion dollars as narwhals? Unlike unicorns, narwhals swim in the ocean - so they are liquid. Like unicorns, their existence is threatened due to human actions … and discretionary write downs. Like unicorns, narwhals are rare - there are only 75,000 in the world. Like unicorns, narwhals have a horn - – actually a helical tusk Narwhals may not elicit thoughts of rainbows and lucky pennies, but the narwhal, unlike the unicorn, actually exists.
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