Next step: Matrix Partners

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I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Matrix Partners as a General Partner.

I’ll be investing across a variety of categories but, broadly speaking, I love products that leverage hard technical underpinnings to become indispensable for consumers or developers. And I gravitate to founders that want to build an engineering-centric company that is focused on a durable mission.

When I left Facebook late last year, I didn’t have a game plan for the next step. After the great adventure of Parse over the last five years and a few startups before that, I was just looking forward to the first real break of my working life. So I embarked on a lot of travel, fixed some health issues, and got married — all things I’d been delaying far too long.

In between all of that, I spent a lot of time with many of my 30+ angel investments like Gitlab, Clearbit, Airtable, and with the teams going through Y Combinator. And I found it consistently rewarding to help founders solve problems, brainstorm ideas, and talk through the highs and epic lows that wash over you while working on an early stage company.

So I started to entertain the notion of investing full-time and, after nearly a year of meetings and dinners, came to choose this path as an investor at Matrix as my next adventure.

Matrix is a small, focused, and understated firm in an atmosphere that is trending in the other direction. The partnership is a group of low key founders and operators, many of whom are immigrants, so I feel like I fit in. They value independent thinking and establishing deep, long-term relationships with founders and their companies.

The firm is on its tenth fund making early stage investments and has a long history of strong performance. Past wins include Apple, SanDisk, Aruba Networks, Ambarella and many more. More recently, the firm led the first round for Oculus VR, invested early in HubSpot and Zendesk which both went public in 2014, and celebrated 2016’s first IPO with Acacia Communications.

Some of Matrix’s current early investments include Namely, Lever, and Quora. The firm also has a strong presence internationally, with the China and India investing arms being early investors in Didi Kauidi and Ola Cabs respectively, just to look at a sector that’s been in the news lately.

I have a lot to learn but I’m excited to get going! If you’re a hacker building something awesome, let’s chat.

I want to thank Qasar, Sam, and PG at Y Combinator for their advice; David Marcus at Facebook for making the connection to Matrix, unbeknownst to me; and many friends like Chris Howard, Dan Levine, and Ilya Fushman for their thoughts on what it’s really like to do this job.