Jim Goetz is a partner at Sequoia Capital, alongside Alfred Lin and Neil Shen, and was one of the firm’s three “stewards”. He remains towards the top of Forbes’ Midas List thanks to his investment in WhatsApp; from 2013 to 2017, he held the coveted number one spot on the list.
The messaging app resulted in a multi-billion dollar return for the firm when Facebook acquired the company for $19 billion in 2014, especially as Sequoia was the app’s only venture investor.
“[WhatsApp] was mission-based and very different than what everyone else was doing at the time,” Jim told Vox in 2014. “A lot of companies, for example, would spend a lot to get recognized by new users and would not worry much about engagement. But WhatsApp only wanted to focus on how current users were engaging with the product. Like how they did not use advertising and kept the experience uncluttered.”
Prior to joining Sequoia Capital, Jim was a general partner at Accel Partners. Before embarking on a career in venture capital, he co-founded VitalSigns Software and was the vice president of network management for Bay Networks. He held various product and marketing roles at AT&T, AT&T Bell Labs and Digital Equipment.
He received a bachelor’s in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He abandoned his PhD program to start his career just like his Sequoia colleague Alfred Lin.
In 2017, after 20 years as an investor with Accel and Sequoia, Jim announced that he would be stepping down from a leadership position with the firm and plans to reduce his workload in an effort to “pay it forward” and “start saying ‘yes'” to other parts of his life.
Tags: Investment and Funding, Sequoia, VCLast updated: May 16, 2019
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