Jon Sakoda wanted to decompress, he says. The founder-turned-venture investor had logged a dozen years with the investing heavyweight New Enterprise Associates after promoting his final startup to Symantec in 2006, and what he wished by final summer season was extra time together with his youngsters, and fewer time together with his telephone, which he turned off for 3 weeks.
“I can’t recommend it enough,” says Sakoda, who has since returned to work and is right this moment taking the wraps off his new enterprise agency, Decibel, a time period typically used to explain exponential modifications within the energy of sounds or indicators despatched by a community and which speaks to the “exponential power” of the agency’s community, says its new web site.
While it’s tempting to poke enjoyable at this declare, it seems from the surface to be true. Though Sakoda is the only founding companion of Decibel — he says he’s wanting so as to add investing professionals proper now — not solely does Decibel benefit from his intensive connections in Silicon Valley; it’s additionally majority backed by Cisco, the community gear maker that’s aggressively reworking itself into extra of a software-focused firm.
Though Sakoda declines to touch upon the precise measurement of Cisco’s funding or the fund’s total composition, citing SEC restrictions, he tells us he’s working very collaboratively with the corporate, together with its company enterprise arm, Cisco Investments.
He’s additionally working with among the many founders to be swept into Cisco over time through its brisk M&A method. For instance, certainly one of these, Jon Oberheide, a founder who bought his firm, Duo Security, to Cisco for greater than $2 billion final 12 months, is at present working with certainly one of Decibel’s portfolio corporations already as an advisor.
Put into context, Oberheide helps with half of Decibel’s portfolio, which incorporates the three-year-old, Vancouver-based cybersecurity startup CMD, which final month closed on $15 million in funding led by GV. (It’s this workforce that Oberheide helps.) Decibel has additionally backed Blameless, a developer of software program for web site reliability engineers that introduced $20 million in funding simply final week led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Sakoda says extra offers are within the works, and explains that what he’s looking for has little overlap with Cisco right this moment, however may finally be a strategic match for the company large. For instance, although Sakoda was concerned in funding Snap on behalf of NEA, he says it’s not so seemingly he’ll be looking for e-commerce or media startups for Decibel.
Absent these areas, although Sakoda means that something goes so long as the corporate isn’t too far alongside. “We’re really going to be looking for startups trying to find product market fit and help with how to grow,” he explains. “If a company has lots of revenue and is already scaling, it’s probably too late for us.”
It makes a form of sense, contemplating that Decibel itself has a methods to go to determine itself. Though an earlier SEC submitting suggests the fund is focusing on $500 million, a pool that might be structured like a conventional enterprise fund (“investments, personnel, and fund governance is all independent” from Cisco, says Sakoda), and although Decibel already has plans to write down checks of between $5 million and $15 million to seed- and Series A-stage corporations, ask Sakoda the place the agency is predicated, and he’ll laughingly inform you he doesn’t fairly know.
Though Decibel has (and takes benefit of) entry to Cisco’s many places of work, together with six in San Francisco alone, Sakoda says he hasn’t “quite figured that out — yet. I’m working on it.”
