Greylock Partners

Greylock is one of the oldest and most consistently top-quartile venture firms in the industry, with a portfolio that includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Workday, Palo Alto Networks, Discord, Figma, Coda, and a long bench of enterprise and consumer category leaders. The firm has historically operated as a small partnership of seven to ten general partners, each highly engaged with a small number of companies, and that operating model means Greylock is not a platform-style firm; the value-add is the partner, not a back-office services bench. For healthcare and AI founders, Greylock has been a serious AI investor for years, with partners including Reid Hoffman, Sarah Guo (now departed but emblematic of the firm’s AI bench), Saam Motamedi, Seth Rosenberg, and others having led or led-co rounds in AI infrastructure and applications across the post-2022 cycle. Healthcare specifically is a smaller slice of the Greylock portfolio than enterprise software or consumer, but the firm has made selective bets in digital health, healthcare workflow software, and clinical AI when the technical profile fits. Stage focus is seed through Series B with a clear preference for early stage; Greylock writes seed checks through a dedicated seed program (“Greylock Edge”) with one-to-three-million entry points, leads Series A and B in the ten-to-thirty-million range, and reserves heavily for follow-ons rather than running a separate growth fund. Geography is US-centric, with offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, plus working presence in New York; the firm does not have international offices and invests selectively outside the US through warm referrals. Founders who should approach Greylock are technical founders building enterprise or consumer software with an AI core, including healthcare-AI founders whose business looks more like enterprise software than like a regulated medical product. Founders should be prepared for a partnership that operates with high conviction and high engagement; Greylock partners typically take board seats and are present in the operating life of a company in a way that founders who want passive capital may find heavier than expected. Founders building deeply regulated medical products (drugs, devices, clinical-stage biotech) or services-heavy care delivery should look elsewhere; this is not Greylock’s category, and even strong founders will struggle to get conviction. The entry path that works best is a warm intro through a portfolio CEO or through one of the firm’s well-known alumni network; partners do read cold inbound, and Greylock has invested in cold-inbound deals, but warm intros materially compress the diligence timeline. When you pitch, lead with the team and the technical wedge: Greylock indexes harder on team quality and on the durability of the technical advantage than on early traction, and partners will ask sharp, specific technical questions early in the process. Caveats: Greylock’s partnership has turned over meaningfully in the last five years, with several senior partners departing, so the partner you target matters more than the firm’s brand; valuations are at market for top-tier seed and Series A but not above market; and the firm runs tight rounds with strong ownership targets, so founders running competitive rounds should set ownership expectations early.