Returning Entrepreneurs: Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya

Congratulations to Tom Chavez, Vivek Vaidya and the rest of the Krux team on joining the Salesforce.com team.

Accel first backed Tom in 1999 when he co-founded Rapt, which went on to be acquired by Microsoft in 2008. This positive experience meant that in 2011 we had the opportunity to lead the Series A in Krux, which provides the leading data management platform to help marketers, publishers and agencies drive revenue by delivering smarter content, commerce and marketing experiences.

Since Jim Swartz and I founded Accel, we have tried to foster a culture that would make us the best partners that our portfolio company management teams worked with. The acid test of our success is the number of entrepreneurs who choose to work with the partners here again and again.

It’s a matter of immense pride that we’ve been able to work with exceptional entrepreneurs multiple times, including, among others: Roger Lindquist (PageMart Wireless then Metro PCS), Marc Lore (Quidsi then Jet.com), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr/Yahoo then Slack), Andrew Kortina (Venmo then Fin Exploration Company), Jim Payne (Mopub then Molabs), Amr Awadallah (Yahoo then Cloudera), and Jeff Hammerbacher (Facebook then Cloudera).

On a personal note, given our long shared history, it’s especially meaningful to see Tom lead yet another company to this moment. As the Krux team well knows, it took commitment and perseverance to get to this point. I hope the Krux team takes a moment to savor it. And then get back to work to build on everything they’ve already done.

— Posted on behalf of Accel co-founder and partner, Arthur Patterson