Greylock partner shares lessons from time at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook

Greylock partner John Elman was involved as a product manager and project manager at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter before jumping to VC investing.

Josh Elman was a product guy who started in the early days of the Big Three social networks ? LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter ? over the course of about seven years.

He also worked in the early days at RealNetwork and Zazzle.

Now he is helping others get their start as a principal at Greylock Partners.

In a conversation with me for Startup Now, Elman talked about his passion for changing the way people interact and communicate with each other and how they discover new information.

We also talked about what lessons he learned working at the social networking pioneers that he is now applying to his new line of work.

So let?s start there:

Tell me one thing you learned from LinkedIn. Facebook and Twitter that you now use at Greylock.

Let me give you a general lesson first. That is that there is always a lot of luck to being successful.

But every decision I saw these companies make was incredibly thoughtful and incredibly deliberate. They made a lot of decisions and moved really fast. But making thoughtful and deliberate decisions was fundamental.

Every time the companies did something we would articulate why we were doing it and whether we could measure if that actually worked. Whether it was taking money from a certain investor or deciding to launch in a certain way at a conference or with a blog post, or deciding to change a feature in a certain way. Whatever.

There was never, ?I think this might work,? or, ?She said this would work,? or, ?I heard from some friends that this was a good idea.? There was always, ?Here?s why we are doing this and if it goes this way we hope to have this kind of outcome.? There was always some way to evaluate the outcome.

Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.

Source: http://feeds.bizjournals.com/~r/vertical_24/~3/O3h_Q7TDeRQ/greylock-partner-shares-secrets-from.html

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