VCs on the Move, September 2012

Moving In…

Early stage venture firm Valhalla Partners has added Randy Jacops as a venture partner and Josh Resnik as a venture advisor. Jacops is a process-improvement operations expert based in Austin, Texas. Prior to joining the firm, Jacops was president and CEO of enterprise software company Versata Enterprises Inc. Resnik is a Washington, D.C.-based digital media executive and angel investor. In addition to his role at Valhalla, Resnik is the founder of Avid Capital Advisors. Valhalla, based in Vienna, Va., focuses on investments in the Mid-Atlantic region, and has backed Adaptly, Fishbowl and GeoMagic.

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Former Pfizer Inc. CEO Jeff Kindler has joined venture firm Lux Capital as a partner, where he will help scout for health care investment opportunities and work with portfolio companies. Kindler retired from Pfizer in December 2010 after eight years with the company. New York City-based Lux Capital focuses on early stage investments in energy, technology, health care and life sciences companies. Among its health care portfolio companies are Cerulean Pharma and Genocea Biosciences.

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Mozilla engineer Mike Hanson left the Internet company recently to join venture firm Greylock Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence. He joins John Lilly at the venture firm. Lilly is a partner at Greylock and was formerly the CEO of Mozilla. Hanson worked for the past three years as a Mozilla engineer, and has worked in various roles at Apple and Cisco. At Stanford University, where Hanson studied computer science and interaction design, he did work on early Web search, and worked on technology for the company that would eventually become Excite.

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Accel Partners added a new partner recently from big data company Splunk, tapping Jake Flomenberg, formerly director of product management at the company. Flomenberg has “a deep technical background, and a good lens into big data” said Ping Li, a partner who manages Accel’s $100 million big data fund and its investments in such companies as data organizing service provider Cloudera. At age 28, Flomenberg is also Accel’s youngest partner. 

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Consumer focused venture firm Maveron has added David Wu as a venture partner in its San Francisco office. Wu, a well-known entrepreneur and angel investor, helped create Homestead.com, where he was chief product officer, COO and CFO. He has invested in such startups as Practice Fusion, Sociable Labs, Postmates, Beautylish and Taulia. Wu also served previously as an executive-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures.

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Crosslink Capital added John Coan as a general partner and head of marketing and client relations. He is based in San Francisco. Coan served previously as managing director of Western region institutional sales for Renaissance Technologies, an algorithmic-trading investment manager. 

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Ted Driscoll has joined Claremont Creek Ventures as a director leading the firm’s digital health care team. He was previously a technology partner. Driscoll has sourced and led four health care deals at Claremont: GigaGen, GeneWeave Bioscience, Zipline Medical and Cureus. In addition to his work at the firm, he is also an angel investor with Health Tech Capital and a founding director of the Sand Hill Angels.

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Emergence Capital Partners, a venture firm focused on SaaS and technology-enabled services, has appointed Sean Jacobsohn as venture partner. Jacobsohn is an angel investor and advisor to startups, including Emergence Capital portfolio company Doximity. Jacobsohn is also co-founder and co-resident of the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels.

Moving Up…

DFJ Gotham Ventures has promoted Thatcher Bell to managing director. He was previously a principal at the firm. Bell joined DFJ Gotham in 2005 and focuses on investments in software, Internet, financial technology and digital marketing. Bell works with such DFJ Gotham portfolio companies as SinglePlatform, ExpoTV, Lumeta and Widetronix.

Moving On…

Bessemer Venture Partners’ Rob Chandra is reportedly scaling back his role at the venture firm to launch Avid Park, a $250 million hedge fund. The hedge fund will use a long-short strategy, meaning it will buy and hold shares in companies it thinks will do well while shorting, or betting against, companies it is less confident in. Chandra is a partner in Bessemer’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and has focused on consumer Internet deals, particularly in emerging markets.

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Andy Miller has joined San Francisco-based Leap Motion as president and COO. Miller previously co-founded and served as CEO of Quattro Wireless; worked for Steve Jobs as vice president of mobile advertising at Apple; and, most recently, worked as a general partner at Highland Capital Partners. Leap makes motion-control software and hardware and has raised $14.1 million since its founding in the fall of 2010. Investors include Highland, which led the company’s $12.8 million Series A round, and seed investors Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, among others.

Compiled by Clancy Nolan