I’m Joining Venrock

I am excited to say that I am joining Venrock as a Partner in New York. I am a part of the recently enhanced Digital Media team, led by the venerable media investor and entrepreneur David Siminoff in Palo Alto. I am proud to also have as my partners Mike Tyrrell who runs Venrock’s Cambridge office and Brian Ascher who runs the Venrock Quarry in addition to his venture activities in Palo Alto.

Venrock, as many of you know, is a firm with a lot of history. It was founded in 1969 as a vehicle for the Rockefellers to invest in and nurture entrepreneur-backed companies. Since then it has grown into a top-tier firm with expertise and an undeniable track record in building lasting, ground-breaking companies in technology, biotech, and now energy and digital media. In a way, I am coming full circle from my Apple days, since Venrock was an early investor in Apple, as well as in Intel, Doubleclick, Check Point, and more recently Athenaheath (ticker: ATHN) among many others.

Venrock has been focused on building a substantial practice in digital media. A veritable juggernaut of venture and entrepreneurial experience has been assembled to take an existing powerful platform and add on top of it a highly-focused digital media practice. I am not the catalyst for this, but am lucky enough to be joining the effort.

The investment thesis is simple: the digitization of media creates disruption and massive change in the creation, consumption, distribution and monetization of media. We all bare witness to this every day. And Yahoo, Google, iTunes, TiVo, Facebook, and even eMusic are just a small example of the new value that can be created by this transformation. The exciting part is that this transformation has just begun. And the rate of change increases every year. So our mission is to invest in early stage companies in many verticals in the broad swath of digital media.

Why New York? Well, Venrock has been investing here since 1969. The financial services, IT and healthcare practices in the firm excel. With all of the activity in media happening in New York, Venrock and I want to be a part of it. And we have the resources to do so. Importantly, having a strong truly bi-coastal team, given the center of media buying still revolves around New York, distinguishes Venrock from its peers.

I’ll be at eMusic through December. New contact info at Venrock is forthcoming. If you are a digital media entrepreneur, please reach out.