- Greylock announced recently that it hired David Wadhwani as a venture partner. Wadhwani is coming to Greylock from AppDynamics where he was the CEO.
Greylock announced recently that it hired AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani as a venture partner. At Greylock, Wadhwani will focus on investing in enterprise software, bottom-up SaaS, and consumer subscription businesses. Going forward, Danny Winokur will be succeeding Wadhwani as the CEO of AppDynamics.
“David is among the software industry’s most accomplished leaders. He has a strong product and learning mindset and has been a pioneer in the software industry’s move to a subscription business model,” said Asheem Chandna of Greylock Partners in a blog post. “He is one of the very best full spectrum operators I’ve had the privilege of working with — industry-leading experience across consumer and enterprise markets, and capabilities and insights across functions including product, go-to-market, and finance. His demeanor and humility fronts a fiercely competitive drive, and a commitment to help teams win and be their very best.”
Chandna said that Greylock knew of David by reputation and had cold-called him in 2015 during the CEO search process at AppDynamics. At that time, Wadhwani was a senior executive at Adobe and was overseeing the Digital Media business — which represented nearly three-quarters of Adobe’s overall revenue.
While at AppDynamics, Wadhwani took over a fast-growing innovative business built by Jyoti Bansal. And Wadhwani evolved the management team, prioritized and focused the product line, and built out the go-to-market team. Around January 2017, AppDynamics was less than 2 days from its IPO when Cisco announced it was going to acquire the company for nearly $4 billion. After that, Wadhwani continued working at Cisco as the CEO of AppDynamics for two and a half years after the acquisition.
“While I’ll be exclusively investing with Greylock, I’m also looking forward to maintaining my relationship with Lightspeed and Ravi Mhatre (who led Lightspeed’s investment in AppDynamics). I will be joining as an inaugural member of the Lightspeed CEO Advisory Council, along with John Thompson (Chairman of Microsoft), Bipul Sinha (Founder and CEO of Rubrik) and Gregg Schott (CEO of Mulesoft),” wrote Wadhwani. “Additionally, I look forward to continuing my role on the Digital Advisory Board for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Board of Advisors for Brown University’s Computer Science Department and the Board of Trustees for StoryCorps and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.”
