Restless. Irreverent. Greylock GP. @GreylockVC
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2008
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I don't blog often, but when I do, I buy the domain names. 😜 TheNewMoats.com UnitOfValue.com VCrisks.com TheOnDemandEnterprise.com EvolutionOfCloud.com CastlesInThe.Cloud OpenSourceVsCloudCastles.com TheNewNewMoats.com
Jerry Chen retweeted
Watch the full episode youtu.be/0VbD6YYN-vM?si=c3vp…
Jerry Chen retweeted
Founders learn to obsess over product-market fit. Greylock Partner @jerrychen says to look just as hard at who should write the first check. He calls it founder-VC fit.
In 2018, Jerry read a technical blog about M3, an open source project built at Uber, led by engineers Rob Skillington @roskilli and Martin Mao @martin_c_mao. At the time, they hadn’t even decided to start a company.
What followed was a five-month courtship.
Jerry was trying to convince Martin and Rob to take his investment. As first-time founders, they were diligencing him just as closely.
Martin sent him an 85-page business plan to see who would really do the work, understand the technology, and align with where they wanted to take it.
Rob and Martin eventually started @chronosphereio, with M3 as its technical foundation and Jerry wrote the company’s first check.
Seven years later, the company was acquired by @PaloAltoNtwks for $3.35B.
For founders, choosing the early investor can shape the company’s trajectory for years. The relationship deserves as much diligence as the financing.
Full story in the comments.
Working with @martin_c_mao and @roskilli and the @chronosphereio team was a wonderful journey. Excited to have Martin share the story in this podcast!
Founders learn to obsess over product-market fit. Greylock Partner @jerrychen says to look just as hard at who should write the first check. He calls it founder-VC fit.
In 2018, Jerry read a technical blog about M3, an open source project built at Uber, led by engineers Rob Skillington @roskilli and Martin Mao @martin_c_mao. At the time, they hadn’t even decided to start a company.
What followed was a five-month courtship.
Jerry was trying to convince Martin and Rob to take his investment. As first-time founders, they were diligencing him just as closely.
Martin sent him an 85-page business plan to see who would really do the work, understand the technology, and align with where they wanted to take it.
Rob and Martin eventually started @chronosphereio, with M3 as its technical foundation and Jerry wrote the company’s first check.
Seven years later, the company was acquired by @PaloAltoNtwks for $3.35B.
For founders, choosing the early investor can shape the company’s trajectory for years. The relationship deserves as much diligence as the financing.
Full story in the comments.
Jerry Chen retweeted
Thank you to @eglyman @karimatiyeh and the @tryramp team for constantly being positive sum
Releasing the secret sauce behind Ramp's velocity, so every company can move fast, and save money
Jerry Chen retweeted
When attackers use new sophisticated #AI, enterprise defenders cannot rely on legacy #cyber with AI only bolted on top.
I’m excited about what @CylakeAI is building from the ground up, with customers keeping full control of their data and infrastructure.
Thanks René Bonvanie for the insightful conversation.
Cybersecurity has always been asymmetric: attackers only need to find one opening, while defenders have to protect everything that matters. Now, AI is changing the scale and speed of that equation.
@chandna, Partner at @GreylockVC and Cylake board member, believes we're entering an era of machines fighting machines, where increasingly sophisticated attacks powered by “bad AI” will require equally capable “good AI” on defense.
In Episode 6 of Inside Cybersecurity, Asheem joins @renebonvanie to discuss what AI means for the cybersecurity stack, why truly AI-native architectures need to be built differently, and what three decades in cybersecurity have taught him about the people and companies that successfully navigate major technology shifts.
🎧 Watch Episode 6 of Inside Cybersecurity: cylake.substack.com/p/good-a…
Jerry Chen retweeted
Last week, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and I debated Iceberg and open table formats on a post. Then I caught myself.
Why are we debating each other while Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift still default customers to closed formats?
Two years of Iceberg announcements. Still no public retirement date for their closed formats.
Open-source projects get scrutinized for interoperability on every release. The largest warehouses should meet the same bar.
We’ve spent a decade building open formats and data lakes. I think it’s time we asked.
ALT Anakin and Padmé meme. Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift in 2024: “The future is open. Use Iceberg.” Data community: “So you’ll retire your closed formats?” The same warehouses in 2026 say nothing, and the data community asks: “You’re still planning to retire them... right?
Jerry Chen retweeted
Today we are open-sourcing 🥕Karotte, our framework for building RL environments.
We've used it for the past year to build MLE RL environments for frontier labs, and it's been hardened through 1M+ evaluation runs and red-teaming.
Jerry Chen retweeted
This is why you should run your agents in Linux VMs in the cloud with a team (niteshift.dev) that has obsesses over benchmarking performance and pushing the major sandbox providers on faster and faster guest VM perf
Jerry Chen retweeted
To squeeze the performance out of our runtime components, we implemented a good amount of concepts from - SEDA: an architecture for well-conditioned, scalable internet services dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/50205…
The seminal work at MIT around writing high-performance server software and the gift that keeps on giving.
Jerry Chen retweeted
Lots of really great talks at @modal Runtime. My favorite so far is the talk by @smehmood (cofounder of @niteshiftdev). He argues that you should treat agent sandboxes as a lossy cache, not the source of truth. Persist the essential state, let agents rebuild after failures, and keep the speed of running the harness inside the sandbox. This gives you reliability without sacrificing latency. Also really interesting hearing how @ListenLabs is building autoresearch agents and hillclimbing on their evals with Niteshift.
Jerry Chen retweeted
Today we announced “BYOC 2.0” at Modal Runtime for niteshift.dev!
BYOC 1.0 meant “runs in your AWS account” and so BYOC 2.0 means “runs in your Modal account”
Today, @modal is the only cloud provider with top-tier products for both sandboxing and inference — the two most important primitives for agents.
We think BYOC 2.0 unlocks fundamentally new use cases for cloud coding agents. Your agents can finally process sensitive customer data without it being stored outside of your account. Customers are using niteshift.dev today to resolve production issues and improve their agents against real production data.
If you want a cloud coding agent platform that keeps your most sensitive data inside your Modal account’s security perimeter, please DM me for access to our Private Beta!
Lots of really great talks at @modal Runtime. My favorite so far is the talk by @smehmood (cofounder of @niteshiftdev). He argues that you should treat agent sandboxes as a lossy cache, not the source of truth. Persist the essential state, let agents rebuild after failures, and keep the speed of running the harness inside the sandbox. This gives you reliability without sacrificing latency. Also really interesting hearing how @ListenLabs is building autoresearch agents and hillclimbing on their evals with Niteshift.
Jerry Chen retweeted
Exclusive: Inside @baseten
The $13B startup at the centre of the biggest fight in AI - Open vs Closed.
We spent a day at their SF HQ with co-founder & CEO Tuhin Srivastava, Charlie O'Neill, Mudith Jayasekara and the Base Labs team - to understand why they're building an open ecosystem.
Backed by top VCs led by @saranormous @altcap @apoorv03 @wmccarthy11 @saammotamedi @nikiscevak @lachygroom @willreed + more. Plus participation from @nvidia.
0:00 The Open vs Closed AI War
2:18 A Billion AI Requests a Day
3:43 The Best Models Are Chinese
4:06 Tuhin: Don't Rent Intelligence
5:09 Sachin & Tuhin Talk Cricket
6:02 Tuhin: The Real Bottleneck
10:15 Why Launch Base Labs?
11:35 "You Have to Have an Opinion"
12:52 Centralised Control Is the Danger
13:07 Publish Everything, Even Fails
15:08 Hugging Face & the 6-Month Gap
16:10 Why We Still Need Closed
Jerry Chen retweeted
Just like founder-led sales, early-stage hiring requires founder-led recruiting.
For founders coming from big companies, that means unlearning a recruiting playbook built around brand pull and recruiting infrastructure.
Dwane Hamilton (@dwanehamilton) from Greylock’s Core Talent team breaks down what founder-led recruiting looks like in practice: building trust directly, staying persistent, and making the process much more personal.
Link in the comments.
Jerry Chen retweeted
Today we’re introducing Extract v2.5 - a series of frontier agents tuned for document extraction.
The agents (cost-effective, agentic, agentic plus) are tuned for value accuracy and grounding. Our extraction agents outperform Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol while being 30%-4x cheaper.
We’ve made massive improvements on complex extraction over
* long lists (86.1% -> 95.5% on our agentic tier)
* records spanning pages (85.5% -> 96.5%)
* scanned forms (90.9% -> 95.7%)
We’ve also launched the following features:
✅ Advanced citations: we locate bounding boxes for all supporting values for an inferred field, even if there's not an exact match.
✅ Structural Reasoning: we tailor document extraction algorithms depending on the type, layout, and information
Our extraction agents are SOTA in price-performance on ExtractBench, across a wide range of cost points. We are the best tool for document extraction across documents of any complexity.
Blog: llamaindex.ai/blog/introduci…
All of these are available on LlamaParse: cloud.llamaindex.ai/ . Come check it out!
Jerry Chen retweeted
Sharing our thesis for co-leading the Series A in Parallax, the AI energy company
greylock.com/blog/introducin…
Jerry Chen retweeted
Congrats to Alfred, Florian, and the rest of our friends at Listen! It's been awesome supporting you all in shipping better agents/software with niteshift.dev to better understand customers.
Excited to see what you all build as part of Salesforce Labs!
Listen Labs is joining @Salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What started as an AI interviewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
Jerry Chen retweeted
Excited to be speaking at Modal Runtime alongside an insanely stacked group of speakers!
Will be talking about how we're making agents on niteshift.dev faster, cheaper, and more reliable using @modal!
The full Runtime agenda is live, including talks from:
@ScottWu46, Co-founder & CEO @cognition
@CompleteSkeptic, Co-founder & CEO @typesafeai
@dylan522p, Founder & CEO @SemiAnalysis_
@sarahookr, Co-founder & CEO @adaptionlabs
@ajratner, Co-founder & CEO @SnorkelAI
Jerry Chen retweeted
i raised my first 3 rounds of capital ($20M+) before he graduated high school
