On behalf of a16z, I am thrilled to welcome Joe Morrissey as a General Partner to the a16z Growth team. Joe will focus on investing in enterprise companies—from the moment they’ve found product-market fit, all the way through to when they are public companies, as our Growth fund continues to partner with companies every step of the way, at every capital event.
Joe brings extensive experience scaling growth-stage companies, with a background that augments our early stage investing team. He has built and scaled high performance teams at a variety of B2B companies, and most recently was chief revenue officer of Segment, which was acquired by Twilio for $3.2B in 2020. At Twilio, he implemented a value-based sales motion to scale Segment’s product-led growth, and increased annual recurring revenue by 150% before their acquisition. Prior to Segment, he grew Hortonworks’ EMEA and APAC business by over 200% before the company’s $5.2B merger with Cloudera. Before that, Joe built and expanded the EMEA business at MongoDB across new markets. Joe was also VP sales at MySQL, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1B in 2007. He began his career in software at Oracle.
Joe is unique because he has worked with a multitude of business types—SaaS, dev tools, data, open source—with a range of go-to-market motions, including bottom-up, product-led growth and top-down sales. He is a go-to-market leader, who has been at the forefront of international expansion, with extensive experience turning businesses around and accelerating growth. Equally important, he has worked with both seasoned, professional CEOs as well as first-time, product-focused founders. This range of experience and depth of expertise will be invaluable to our founders in the Growth portfolio.
We got to know Joe over the past year and very much look forward to having him start officially later this summer. Like many a16z GPs, he’s a strong operator, who knows what success looks like at scale, but also has the empathy one gets from battling through real adversity.
Welcome to the a16z team, Joe!
***