Bill Trenchard Joins First Round Capital as Partner in San Francisco

 Bill Trenchard has joined the early-stage venture capital firm First Round Capital as a partner. Trenchard, who informally joined First Round in June, was previously investing on behalf of the early-stage, entrepreneur-led venture capital fund Founder Collective. Before becoming an investor, Trenchard was a founder at CallCast (which was later merged to form LiveOps) and Jump Networks (acquired by Microsoft).

From First Round’s  blog:

Welcoming Bill Trenchard to First Round Capital

I’m super excited to announce that Bill Trenchard has joined First Round Capital as a partner in our San Francisco office. I’ve known Bill for almost 20 years – first meeting him when he was a student at Cornell and his web development company did work for my first company.
Date: October 30, 2012

Author: Josh Kopelman – Partner

And we’ve remained close as he started Jump Networks (which was quickly acquired by Microsoft), joined idealab! (where he worked with my partner, Howard Morgan), founded CallCast (in which I invested – and merged to become LiveOps. Bill ran LiveOps until 2007, scaling it to a $100M run-rate with 250 employees), and at Readyforce (in which First Round Capital invested).

Bill is an experienced entrepreneur and investor (he’s done angel investing on his own – and previously was affiliated with Founder Collective). And he has been a mentor and advisor to countless startups – and knows what it takes to be a successful founder. Bill has begun a blog where he plans to share lessons learned, tips, tricks and other insights into entrepreneurship. His first post is here.

While we did not have any plans to hire an additional partner at this point in time (having just promoted Kent and Phin to partner positions), when we heard that Bill was considering taking a full-time venture job, we knew we had to try to get Bill to join First Round Capital. Bill shares our values – he’s founder-focused, he understands seed-stage, he can empathize with founders because he’s been in their shoes, he works hard to help his companies succeed, and he is an all-around-great person.

After Bill spent the summer “in residence” with First Round, we were even more convinced that Bill is a great addition to our team. He’s already led two (still unannounced) investments for the fund – and has brought a number of great ideas on how we might expand the suite of products and services we offer to our portfolio companies. And since our partnership is now larger (by around 15%), we’ve decided to increase the size of our current fund (FRC IV) by approximately 15% as well. This is the first significant fund-size increase we’ve made in over five years – and it does not reflect any change in our strategy.

In fact, today we’ve also announced the launch of our new First Round Capital website to better communicate our strategy, values and value-add. We wanted to tell the First Round Capital story and how hard we work to help our 150+ companies win – and to begin to share the knowledge our Community and collaborators produce to help people build better products and companies. Check it out here…