Greylock has led a number of exciting changes in the past year, including moving its headquarters from Boston to Silicon Valley, raising a new $575 million fund, hiring some new talent and moving our West coast team from San Mateo to a brand new office building on Sand Hill Rd. As a part of this effort we also decided to update our visual identity.
We wanted to make sure that our new identity matched the personality and strategic direction of the firm. When we thought about who we are, how we approach our business and what we value most, one theme kept emerging: partnership.
Then the fun started! We considered hundreds of logos, dozens of fonts and colors and after a number of course corrections we came up with a logo we all think best conveys our focus on partnership. Here it is:
We thought “greylock” and “partners” should be on equal footing, so we placed them next to each other rather than stacking them. We also wanted to bring additional emphasis to the word partners so we pumped it up in weight and color. Next, we added a period at the end so that the name of the firm becomes a sentence. Once you do that, the word “partners” becomes more than just a proper noun, but also a verb. Now our logo is as much as statement of who we are as a statement about what we do.
We took it a step farther on our business cards. Dictionaries and thesauri in hand (and lots of online searching), we talked about hundreds of action verbs that best describe how we work with entrepreneurs. We connect them to talent, partners and resources in the tech community; we help entrepreneurs ignite powerful ideas to launch new ventures; we partner with founders, investors and others in the start-up community, we help founders build strong companies, we provide start-ups with the tools and strategies they need to scale and we are committed to delivering on our promises.
We figured we were on such a roll we should go ahead create a Web site favicon and an abbreviated version of the logo to use as an avatar on social media sites:
We hope you like the new Greylock identity. Let us know what you think!
-Erika
Erika Brown Ekiel is the director of marketing at Greylock Partners. Prior to joining Greylock Erika was an associate editor with Forbes, covering technology, start-ups and venture capital from the Silicon Valley bureau.
