by Randy Glein, DFJ Partner
Venture capital is an apprenticeship business. The career progression from junior investment professional to partner typically takes several fund cycles and the better part of a decade. It simply takes time to master our business, coupled with constant mentoring and nurturing from those who have gone before.
Every now and then, however, someone comes along to disrupt our organizational thinking, moving down the learning curve faster and more deftly than expected. That has been our experience with Sam Fort.
Sam joined us a little more than five years ago, and has worked tirelessly to help us take our game at DFJ Growth to a new level of excellence. We are thrilled to have Sam on our team, and are proud to announce that he is being promoted to become our newest investing partner.
Since joining DFJ more than a decade ago, I have been constantly amazed at the spirit of innovation and teamwork at our firm as we seek to partner with the most exciting companies in the world. It takes shared vision and conviction to invest in startups when they are young and relatively unknown, as we did with Box, Solar City, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and Twitter. Sam has embraced this challenge, consistently demonstrating an innate ability to evaluate technology trends, markets, and individual companies contending for leadership in their respective sectors. He has learned to Think Big with us, seamlessly integrating with our culture of collaboration and passion for pioneering innovation at DFJ.
In an era where capital is plentiful for technology startups, Sam has found a way to separate himself and DFJ by engaging with founders and CEOs through a spirit of partnership.
This effort has led our team to discover emerging leaders like DataStax, Renovate America, and Yammer. While we approach each of these opportunities as a team, Sam’s efforts on the front lines have been invaluable.
As we reflect on 2015, we have so much to be grateful for, including the visionary entrepreneurs we have the privilege of working with every day and the limited partners who support our firm. None of this would be possible without the tremendous team we have built at DFJ. This includes everyone across our organization, from our finance group who keeps our operation running smoothly, to our services team who supports our portfolio companies, to our world-class investment team and everyone in between. So to everyone on Team DFJ, I want to offer a truly heartfelt “THANK YOU” as we close another fantastic year.
Looking ahead to 2016, we know our future is even brighter with Sam as our partner. We are excited to discover the next generation of innovative technology companies with Sam — and the next, and the next, and the next. I want to wish a very Happy New Year to the people of DFJ, and to entrepreneurs everywhere who relentlessly pursue their dreams and inspire us every day! To them I offer these words of encouragement, in homage to the epic Star Wars triple trilogy — Let the Force Awaken!
Randy Glein is a founder and partner of DFJ Growth
@rglein
