Joining Accel as an EIR
A friend of mine once said: ‘as an engineer the greatest pleasure in life is to build something wonderful and watch it run’. That has stayed with me. I remain a software engineer at heart (though you really don’t want to see my code), and as my career has progressed my focus has shifted. In the early days the ‘thing’ I worked to build was the project, later it was the team, then teams of teams. It culminated in what I believe is the most amazing thing to ‘build and watch run’: the company.
There is nothing more enlivening than company building. It brings together a wonderfully complex mix of technical problem solving, business acumen and perhaps most importantly supporting and enabling people to create something special. I truly enjoyed the Heptio journey as a founder and CEO, and loved the subsequent experience at VMware leading the Tanzu engineering and product management teams. There are some things that you simply cannot learn without doing, and having an opportunity to work with some truly great leaders was wonderful. But leading a great team isn’t the same as building a company from the ground up. Also, the whole experience was way too short for my taste. :) We went from incorporation to an exit at VMware in around two years and I feel like I still had a lot of unfinished business in the startup ecosystem.
Along the journey, Accel was a remarkable partner to Joe Beda, myself, and the broader Heptio leadership team. Firms billing themselves as ‘founder friendly’ have become almost a given these days in venture capital, but I haven’t run into but a few individuals that walk the walk the way the Accel team does. It isn’t about permissiveness — that isn’t friendly at all. It isn’t friendly to let someone go off and do something you know will hurt them in the long run. It is about what we at Heptio used to call ‘kind directness’. Willingness to have the conversation without making it personal, and ultimately supporting the choice the founders make. It is about a legitimate and authentic connection and commitment to the founder and the process of company building and seeing the long game. This drew me to Accel in the first place, and has drawn me back as I think about what is next for me.
I have signed on as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel. For those of you unfamiliar with the term it means that I will be working with Accel to figure out what the next company I get to ‘build and watch run’ is. I have a couple of ideas that I am working on, but am not ready to talk about it broadly and ruin the surprise.
Looking forward to exciting days ahead!
