Matt Cohler, employee No. 5 at Facebook, will leave the high-flying social network this fall to join venture firm Benchmark Capital as its youngest general partner at 31 years old.
Matt Cohler
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)Cohler, whose job description, as written on Facebook, is "ensuring that Zuck (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) never makes it back to Harvard," has been the company's technical adviser, recruiter, and business strategist since 2005, roughly a year after the company started from a dorm room at Harvard University. Cohler said he will remain a special adviser to "Zuck" and the executive team at Facebook even after he moves to Benchmark as an investor in early-stage Internet start-ups. (Facebook does not have an advisory team, so the adviser role will be new to the company.)
Many early employees of companies such as Google and Yahoo are hearing the siren call of venture investing, but this is a first for Facebook. When it comes to executive moves, the social network makes many more headlines for new executive hires. Still, Bryan Schreier, a former Google employee, not too long ago joined Sequoia Capital, an early investor in the search giant. Jeff Weiner, a longtime vice president at Yahoo, recently joined Accel Partners and Greylock Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence, following former Yahoo colleagues.
Cohler, a graduate of Yale University with a bachelor's of arts, has a healthy track record of picking promising start-ups and entrepreneurs, a talent that Benchmark partner Peter Fenton believes will translate well to venture investing. "He's worked at the center of social media and he's established himself as a go-to person for young entrepreneurs," said Fenton, 35, who's known Cohler for several years.
Cohler met the Facebook founders in 2004 through Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and Facebook's first angel investor. He was introduced to Thiel through Reed Hoffman, the founder of business social network LinkedIn, which this week raised $53 million for a valuation of $1 billion. Cohler joined LinkedIn as a member of its founding team and a general manager.
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Benchmark, which now has nine partners, is known for its early investment in eBay, Handspring, and Red Hat Software. Despite its eye for promising young companies, it does not have an investment in Facebook. (Cohler said that he has not talked with the venture firm about it taking an investment in Facebook.) Benchmark's portfolio includes Zillow.com and OpenTable.
As for his experience at Facebook, Cohler said, "I've loved Facebook, the people, the product. I just knew my long-term trajectory would be to be an early stage investor."
Cohler's Facebook status on Thursday? "I'm excited for LinkedIn!"
Mint, a personal finance site akin to Quicken, said Wednesday that it raised $12 million in a series "B" round of financing led by Benchmark Capital, the venerable VC behind eBay and Amazon.com.
Other participating investors include Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and Felicis Ventures--which were all original backers of Mint.
Benchmark's endorsement is sizeable given that Mint launched less than six months ago. In that time, Mint has signed up more than 160,000 customers for its free personal finance services, according to the company. Mountain View, Calif.-based Mint helps people manage their credit and spending, points out potential savings on monthly bills, and offers people support for investment accounts.
Benchmark general partner Bob Kagle will join Mint's board. "We are excited about the company's ability to help people make better financial decisions and improve their lives."
Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer said he plans to use the funds to expand Mint's product offerings, but did not specify how. "We're ready to further accelerate our growth and product development," Patzer said in a statement.
If you're looking for a seasoned, open-source savvy executive team, you might look to MySQL or another leading open-source company. But if you want that team to come with investment dollars attached, you'd do far better to look to Benchmark Capital. In addition to Kevin Harvey (MySQL, Red Hat, etc.) and Peter Fenton (JBoss, Hyperic, SpringSource, etc.), Benchmark just added four new EIRs (Entrepreneurs in Residence), two of which will focus on open-source investment opportunities.
Benchmarks's Bob Kagle notes the importance of EIRs:
By bringing seasoned executives into the firm to found new businesses or work with our portfolio companies, everyone benefits. They understand the challenges of running a start-up, and demonstrate by example what it takes to build, manage and lead fast-growth technology companies.
This is particularly true in open source, given the relative dearth of understanding of how to build a successful open-source business. Anyone who needs a hand in doing so will almost certainly want to tap into one of Benchmark's new EIRs: Rob Bearden.
... Read moreLast week, Benchmark announced a $3.5 million investment in Engine Yard, which provides commercial support for Ruby on Rails applications. Engine Yard is doing $3 million in business and growing. It's also profitable. It didn't need the investment.
The investment, however, is very telling. When one of the top venture capital firms on the planet puts hard dollars behind a support model, it's significant. It becomes doubly so when the firm (or its investors) in question previously invested in JBoss, MySQL, SpringSource (Interface21), and other support-based open-source companies.
It may mean that Benchmark knows something that the rest of the industry seems determined to ignore: services-based businesses may well be the future of the software industry.
... Read moreVMware has released a public beta version of a virtualization speed test. Called VMmark, it enables people to see how well server hardware runs software using virtualization, which lets multiple operating systems run simultaneously on the same machine to increase efficiency.
The test runs various virtual machines--a database server, file server and Web server--using Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server. But it's not for the faint of heart--it requires a server with at least 5GB of memory, and those running Windows tests will need to be members of the Microsoft Developer Network, according to a blog posting by VMware's Bruce Herndon.
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