Top Silicon Valley Investor Jonathan Teo to visit Melbourne as a guest of IO
We're thrilled to announce that our investor group Investors' Organisation (IO) will be bringing Jonathan Teo, managing director of top Silicon Valley VC firm General Catalyst Partners down to Melbourne for a visit in October.
This is very exciting news to have a venture capitalist of Jonathan's calibre down to Melbourne, which is home to many amazing start-up success stories including 99designs, RetailMeNot (NASDAQ: SALE), Kaggle, and CatchoftheDay. Of course, my own start-up OneTouch is also from Melbourne, although we still have a lot to do before we are able to be placed alongside such illustrious company!
Jonathan will be in town in late October where we will be holding a major IO lunch at the offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers to share his investing insights to an audience of local investors. He will also be running a mentoring session for a handful of selected promising startups, and as our gift to the start-up community, we will also be jointly holding a public event in conjuction with Lean Startup Melbourne at inspire9 so stay tuned for details. The news was recently featured by leading start-up publication, Startupsmart.
This comes off the back of another notable investor, Bill Tai, of Charles River Ventures who was recently in Melbourne as part of the oZapp roadshow. To read some of the insights that were shared by Bill, click here.
It's fantastic that such high-profile investors are taking an interest in Melbourne's burgeoning start-up scene, and for our IO members to learn how to hit homeruns when investing in startups.
Below is a profile of General Catalyst and Jonathan Teo, with links to their Crunchbase profiles embedded.
General Catalyst Partners are recognised globally as one of the most prestigious venture capital firms with $2.2 billion of capital under management. Some of its notable investments include Kayak (exited for $1.8 billion in 2012), AirBnB (recently valued at over $2.5 billion) and Australia's own BigCommerce, which has raised a total of $75 million in venture capital.
As a managing director, Jonathan Teo invests in both new and existing technology businesses. His areas of special interest include: enterprise software / infrastructure and consumer internet / social media. Since joining General Catalyst, Jonathan has led an investment in SnapChat (valuation of $800 million in under 2 years).
Prior to joining General Catalyst, Jonathan was a Principal at Benchmark Capital, another top-tier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, where he led early investments in Twitter (to IPO for an estimated $15 billion) and Instagram (sold to Facebook for $1 billion after only two years). Before he became a venture capitalist, Jonathan was an engineering manager at Google, where he played a key role in the company’s international expansion, including setting up Google’s R&D centre in Shanghai, as well as spearheading international team-building efforts in Israel, Brazil and South Korea.
Jonathan earned a Master of Science in Management Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Sydney University. Having personally led early-investments in the 3 hottest start-ups of the last 4 years, we are are thrilled to be able to bring Jonathan to Australia to share his experiences and provide insights into his start-up investing philosophies to our members.
Jonathan will be provided an official welcome by the Doron Ben-Meir, CEO of Commercialisation Australia and former serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. (full profile here). Commercialisation Australia is a $278 million Australian government initiative that provides grant funding of up to $2 million to early-stage, innovative companies.