Sridhar Ramaswamy, the SVP Of Ads & Commerce at Google, is departing the search giant company to join Greylock Partners as a venture partner. Google’s VP of apps for Google Cloud Prabhakar Raghavan will be succeeding Ramaswamy for that position.
Ramaswamy worked at Google for about 15 years and he oversaw Google’s Ads and Commerce products. Ramaswamy had joined Google as an engineer and grew the corporate ladder rather quickly. In 2014, Ramaswamy assumed the role as the SVP of Ads & Commerce after Susan Wojcicki was named as CEO of YouTube.
Greylock is going to have Ramaswamy focus on investing in companies that leverage data at scale, artificial intelligence and machine learning and analytics to deliver insights for consumers or enterprises.
“I have been extremely privileged to have spent the past 15 years at Google, where I focused on starting and scaling new businesses and platforms. I have always been drawn to earlier stage entrepreneurial projects and becoming a venture partner at Greylock is an exceptional way to explore these types of opportunities,” said Ramaswamy in a statement. “I am excited by the prospect of working with the amazing partners at Greylock and the great entrepreneurs that they have backed.”
Ramaswamy is known for overseeing Google’s algorithms to ensure that ads were targeted to users in a way that drove the most profits. He joined the ads team in 2003 when it was hitting $1.5 billion in revenue. Today that division is seeing a revenue run rate of more than $100 billion. According to Ramaswamy’s LinkedIn profile, he was previously an engineering director at Engineering Director at E.piphany and also worked as a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories.
In a blog post, Asheem Chandna (Greylock partner) and Reid Hoffman (Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder) said that they were hoping to work with Ramaswamy for years. Chandna first met Ramaswamy at the Starbucks on Sand Hill Road in 2015. And since then, Ramaswamy has been developing “growing relationships of mutual respect” with several of the team members at Greylock.
