Jerry Chen

Who they are

Jerry Chen is a Partner at Greylock — co-founded AboveNet Communications in 1996 (later listed on NASDAQ) and built a mobile game called SABER that hit over a million downloads.

Person

Jerry joined Greylock in 2013 when it was already a multi-decade-old, well-established firm — and he's been there for over a decade since. His academic path is unusually international: BS in Electrical Engineering from National Tsing Hua University, then an MBA from University of Hartford, then another MBA from Harvard Business School. He came up through McKinsey and Bain consulting, then spent years at VMware as VP of Cloud and Application Services — hands-on enterprise infrastructure work, not just theory. Earlier he co-founded AboveNet Communications in 1996, a comms company that listed on NASDAQ, and ran its Asia-Pacific operations. The through-line is operator-to-investor: he built and scaled enterprise products before he started writing checks, which shapes how he talks about cloud, developer tools, and AI. He writes prolifically — a personal blog at blog.jerrychen.com (called Loose Change), essays on Medium at medium.com/@jerrychen, and a TechCrunch author page — covering Systems of Intelligence, developer-led growth, and what comes next in AI cloud. He's also appeared on Masters of Scale, 20VC, Software Engineering Daily, and TechCrunch Disrupt panels. Possibly — he built a mobile game called SABER with over a million downloads, and has a side project called Patatri's Kitchen, an AI assistant that tracks his pantry and plans meals.

Network

No direct relationship edges were surfaced in the probe. From board affiliations, Jerry sits alongside other investors and founders at LlamaIndex, Onehouse, Mandolin, Notable, Chronosphere, Docker, Blend, and Spoke — a network that maps almost entirely onto enterprise infrastructure, developer tooling, and AI data companies. His Greylock affiliation puts him in regular orbit with the firm's other partners across those same verticals.

LlamaIndex founders/team· Portfolio company — board seat
Onehouse team· Portfolio company — board seat
Blend leadership· Portfolio company — board director
Chronosphere team· Portfolio company — board director

How they likely show up

Long tenure at Greylock since 2013 → thinks in multi-year investment arcs, not deal-by-deal sprints; expects the same patience from founders he backs.
VP of Cloud and Application Services at VMware before VC → brings an operator's instinct to product reviews; will push on how infrastructure decisions get made at scale.
Active across blog, Medium, and TechCrunch, plus podcast circuit (Masters of Scale, 20VC, Software Engineering Daily) → comfortable being publicly opinionated; likely responds well to someone who has read his actual arguments, not just his bio.
Co-founded AboveNet Communications and ran its Asia-Pacific operations → has first-hand experience with the chaos of building and taking a company public; not just a spectator to founder stress.
Public themes center on developer-led growth, Systems of Intelligence, and AI cloud → synthesizes frameworks from operational experience; expects conversations to move quickly from concept to mechanism.
Possibly — side projects include a mobile game (SABER, 1M+ downloads) and an AI meal-planning tool (Patatri's Kitchen) → builds things in his spare time, which suggests he stays close to the product craft even as a full-time investor.

Conversation tips

→ Read at least one piece from blog.jerrychen.com (Loose Change) before the meeting — reference a specific argument, not just the topic. He'll know immediately whether you've engaged with his actual thinking.
→ Lead with what you're building for developers or infrastructure teams — his VMware background and public writing make it clear that's where his pattern recognition is strongest.
→ Don't pitch abstract market size; he's written explicitly about frameworks for assessing startup risk and will want to know how you think about the specific structural advantage, not the TAM slide.
→ Ask about AboveNet or the VMware years if you want to understand how he thinks about company-building — he's an operator-turned-investor and that arc is a point of pride.
→ If the conversation touches AI, be precise: he distinguishes between cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and AI data layers (see his Onehouse and LlamaIndex bets) — 'AI company' as a category won't land.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on his LlamaIndex board seat — it's one of the most prominent AI data retrieval companies right now, and asking what drew him to the bet reveals exactly how he thinks about the AI infrastructure stack.
Reference his Loose Change blog at blog.jerrychen.com — specifically his Systems of Intelligence framework, which he's been developing publicly for years. He'll appreciate that you went beyond the Greylock bio page.
Mention the AboveNet co-founding in 1996 and the NASDAQ listing — it's an unusual founding story for a VC partner and it anchors a conversation about what he looks for in founders that he can't see from a pitch deck alone.

Discovery questions

Your Onehouse and LlamaIndex bets both sit at the data layer of the AI stack — what's the thesis connecting them, and where does that layer's value accrue as models commoditize?
You spent years at VMware running cloud and application services before moving to VC — when you're reviewing a founder's technical architecture today, what do operators get wrong that a purely financial investor would miss?
Your public writing has pushed the 'road to startup success goes through developers' argument for years — how has that thesis held up now that AI is blurring the line between the developer as user and the developer as builder?

Avoid

Don't open with generic 'enterprise AI is booming' framing — he's been writing precise frameworks about developer-led growth and AI cloud infrastructure for years and will expect you to engage at that level of specificity.

Make it yours