Josh Elman

At Greylock Partners, Josh invests in entrepreneurs building social networks and platforms, mobile apps, new media, and connected devices. He joined the team in 2011 and invests in entrepreneurs building new consumer products and services. Josh specializes in designing, building, and scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to more than 100 million users. Before joining Greylock, Josh spent 15 years in product and engineering roles at leading companies in social, commerce, and media. Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, growing Twitter’s active user base by nearly 10x. Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect. Josh was an early employee at LinkedIn and helped establish early models for user growth and launched v1 of LinkedIn Jobs. Josh also held roles leading product management for Zazzle, and product and engineering for RealJukebox and RealPlayer at RealNetworks. Josh currently serves on the boards of Medium, Discord, Musical.ly (observer), Life On Air (makers of Houseparty), and Operator. Josh also works closely with our investments in Nextdoor and Whosay. Josh led Greylock’s investment in SmartThings (acquired by Samsung in 2014) and Jelly (acquired by Pinterest in 2017). Josh holds a BS in Symbolic Systems with a focus on Human Computer Interaction from Stanford University.

Building software that connects people, near term science fiction, exploring Bay Area backroads

We are spending more and more time staring at our phones instead of the world around us. Products are harnessing our dopamine to create slot machine type reactions today. Our brains aren't prepared for it. No one questions how incredible having a connected computer in our pockets to tap into all human knowledge is. But we need to work on the balance. My friend Tristan Harris has started an initiative http://timewellspent.io to change how we design software. Please check it out.