David Skok
David Skok is the rare entrepreneur that not only actively seeks feedback on emerging technology and trends, but he shares his perspective on his brilliant blog.
As an experienced and successful entrepreneur himself, it is a fantastic addition to The A-List. There’s a lot to learn here:
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Learn more about Jeremy from his bio:
David Skok joined Matrix Partners as a General Partner in May 2001. He has a wealth of experience running companies. David started his first company in 1977 at age 22. Since then David has founded a total of four separate companies and performed one turn-around. Three of these companies went public.
David joined Matrix from SilverStream Software, which he founded in June 1996. Prior to its July 2002 acquisition by Novell, SilverStream was a public company that had reached a revenue run rate in excess of $100M, with approximately 800 employees and offices in more than 20 countries around the world.
David’s work as a value added investor is best known for helping JBoss take its Open Source business to a successful exit with its sale to Red Hat, and for helping AppIQ, Tabblo and Diligent Technologies, which have all had successful exits, from their inceptions to their acquisitions by HP and IBM. David serves on the boards of Digium (makers of the very popular Asterisk Open Source PBX/telephony software), CloudSwitch, Enservio, OpenSpan, Solidworks, VideoIQ, and HubSpot.
In addition to his broad focus on enterprise software, David is specifically focused on the areas of cloud computing, Open Source, Software as a Service (SaaS), marketing automation, virtualization, storage, and data center automation.
David writes a blog for entrepreneurs and startups on topics such as viral marketing, SaaS metrics, building a sales and marketing machine, techniques for lowering cost of customer acquisition, etc. The blog can be found here: http://www.forEntrepreneurs.com.
Recent popular posts on David’s blog include:
SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition
Lessons Learned – Viral Marketing
Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior
Lessons from Leaders: How JBoss did it
“It is easy to be a cheerleader when things are going well. It is not as easy when things are not going well,” says David. “When I was running Watermark Software, a larger company sued us over patent issues. My other VCs backed away but Matrix Partners stood by me. The firm proved to me that it was supportive of entrepreneurs in the tough times, and long-term in its approach. When I started my next company, SilverStream Software, I didn’t need venture capital, but I invited Matrix to invest with me. Now, as a partner of the firm, it is a great honor to try to bring the same level of support to other entrepreneurs.”
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