Adam Leventhal's Blog

Finding What's Next

After nearly nine years at Sun and then six at Delphix I’m looking for the next technology, team, and market to dive into. I’ve had the extremely good fortune of working with three groups—the DTrace team, Fishworks at Sun, and Delphix—that featured top-tier technologists working on differentiated products, each of them a wonderful place and time. Most recently, as CTO of Delphix, I grew the engineering team from a tiny seed, and was fortunate enough to be joined by so many people from my past including some of my best best friends and long-term colleagues. I’m forever grateful to the team and to the founder, Jed Yueh, who convinced me to join, knowing better than I the team, company, and products we could build.

CTO is a full-time job; there weren’t many spare cycles to contemplate much beyond the exigencies of the business. So I’m excited to join Sutter Hill Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence, an amazing vantage point to find the next thing.

EIR

There doesn’t seem to be a single, clear answer about the job of an EIR. In general though it seems to involve assessing companies and markets, and exploring new possibilities. Unsurprisingly, the Wikipedia page for EIR lists “Artist in Residence” under the “See Also” section: the specific deliverables are of lesser emphasis than the collaboration and community of investors, entrepreneurs and technologists. My focus is to evaluate a variety of technologies (and there’s certainly no shortage), find patterns of business pain, and to land on a problem that excites me (and can excite others) to charge headlong into a new venture.

Sutter Hill

I’m particularly excited to be at Sutter Hill working with Mike Speiser. Sutter has produced companies I admire such as Pure Storage, Snowflake, and SiFive. Mike has a great understanding of what it takes to build enterprise and systems software where I’ve spent my career, and he has a remarkably compelling and sanguine view of company building. At Sutter I’ve found a great, diverse set of technologists from product, to tech, recruiting, and design. I’ve never learned as much or been as impressed as in these initial days at Sutter.

As much as I’m enjoying Sutter Hill I hope to be on my way to the next thing—soon, but not too soon. For now though I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new colleagues and unique vantage point. You can reach me at ahl at shv dot com.