“Been there, done that” isn’t something a lot of investors can say to their founders — especially when it comes to critically important, but non-CEO roles like CRO. When an investor can say that to a founder, it creates a truly special partnership. The kind that can produce a world-class company.
Andy McCall is a person who can say that to founders.
I’ve known Andy for more than a decade, first meeting him when he was running the global sales team for Meraki. Today, it’s easy to think of Meraki — which Cisco acquired in 2012 — as a global networking leader. But when Andy joined the company, the idea of selling networking gear with a SaaS subscription tied to it was a transformational shift for customers.
Historically, customers would buy a switch or router, turn it on, and just run it. Sometimes maintenance contracts for upgrades would be attached. The idea of managing a networking device in the cloud, with a subscription, was a revolutionary idea — one that Andy made hugely successful.
Figuring out how to hire when selling a new business model to customers isn’t easy. Leaders need to understand disposition, sales incentives, and enablement (training) when hiring, building, and scaling. Andy understood all of that: he built a world-class sales organization to sell this breakthrough to customers, and grew Meraki from single-digit millions when he joined to several hundreds of millions in revenue when he left in 2017. His journey at Meraki is one that few go-to-market leaders get to undertake, but it provides a trove of experience that’s applicable to founders at any stage.
However, Andy’s company-building experiences don’t end there. In 2017, he joined the early team of Samsara in forging a new path — providing IoT solutions to the critical industries that drive America, and the world, ahead. Starting with cloud-based fleet-management tools, Samsara has expanded considerably and has built an amazing go-to-market machine to drive it. As its chief revenue officer, Andy was instrumental in taking the company public in 2021, and spearheaded Samsara’s revenue growth from single-digit millions to over $1 billion in ARR when he stepped back in 2023.
Andy is a modest guy, but he develops high-performance organizations in ways that few people ever have. He has a long career as a sales leader and company-builder, and has spent the last year helping founders in his spare time.
Over the years, we’ve worked with thousands of executives, and hundreds of them have been extraordinary. But only a handful have defied gravity and demonstrated their company-building excellence over and over, at all stages of growth. Andy McCall is one of them, so we’re thrilled to announce that he’s joining Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner. He will work across our American Dynamism and AI Apps funds, providing invaluable guidance to our portfolio as a board member who really has been there and done that.
