New Greylock VC Jerry Chen is poised to fund IT disruption

Former VMware executive Jerry Chen has joined Greylock Partners as a partner.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Jerry Chen has jumped from the trenches of data infrastructure disruption to the tranches of funding as a new venture investor at Greylock Partners.
In 10 years at VMware Chen helped create key cloud and Big Data products that went from zero revenue to billions.
The following excerpted Q&A comes from a conversation Chen and I had after his new job was announced.
Why are you switching to venture investing at a time when the data infrastructure sector you have been working in so long is being disrupted?
I guess two things are kind of related, right? You wouldn’t become an investor unless you thought it was a great time to be an investor and think you can help invest into some great companies and great teams. I think the two things came together over my experiences and career at VMware for the past past ten years. I had this awesome perch where I could see all the changes in technology around servers, storage, networking and application infrastructure.
For the first time in a long time every single layer of that IT stack is vulnerable for destruction. We are talking about an area with at least a $150 billion of IT spent each year, if not more. I think all incumbents, from EMC to Oracle to Microsoft, are all vulnerable.
So the thesis that we are putting together at Greylock, myself in particular, we call the post-server world. In this post-server world, applications and servers and computers move from the datacenter to the cloud. The way you think about consuming apps and consuming data and consuming compute changes dramatically, I saw this firsthand at VMware, which is probably the instigator and the leading tip of this transformation. So I felt this was a great time to be an investor.