Ilya Fushman, a former Dropbox executive most recently at Index Ventures, is joining Kleiner Perkins as a general partner and managing member, the firm said today.
Fushman is a big pickup for Kleiner Perkins, who also brought on Social+Capital’s Mamoon Hamid in August last year. All these hires give the impression that Kleiner Perkins, with a storied history but one looking for fresh faces, is getting a bit of a new look with partners like Fushman and Hamid. Fushman will be focusing on enterprise software and infrastructure, financial services, and “industries undergoing digital transformation, with a particular focus on product centric companies developing new go-to-market models.”
That’s a pretty big scope, but Fushman has a lot of experience in the enterprise having worked on that for Dropbox and a lot of cross-pollination between Index Ventures and Social+Capital from Hamid’s days there, including Intercom and Slack.
Over the weekend, Index Ventures also announced that Sarah Cannon would be joining as a partner. She was previously at Alphabet’s CapitalG working with investments like Looker, MultiPlan, Oscar and Care.com. Index Ventures said Cannon will primarily focus on consumer business. It’s also another big hire, but this time on Index Ventures’ side.
“I am thrilled to join Index and work alongside a team of brilliant, diverse, and independent thinkers,” Cannon in a statement said. “I am most excited about the firm’s global orientation and focus on investing in entrepreneurs who will make an impact at scale. I look forward to working with my colleagues to expand our presence in the U.S. and solidify Index’s leadership role in the Valley and beyond.”
There’s actually also a small connection here between Hamid and Fushman from the Dropbox days: Hamid was on the board of directors for CloudOn, a mobile productivity startup that was acquired by Dropbox in 2015. That acquisition happened in January, before Fushman — head of product for Dropbox and Dropbox for Business at the time, according to his LinkedIn — left for Index Ventures in May. Of course these things are tiny in the grand scheme of things, but the venture community is indeed a small one.
“Kleiner Perkins is a firm I have long revered. To be part of building such an iconic brand as it gears up for the future is an opportunity I could not miss,” Fushman said in a statement. “I have deep respect for Mamoon [Hamid] from working together on Slack and Intercom and I am excited to help drive the next chapter of this firm’s history.”
We hosted Fushman on Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly podcast on all things money, to discuss the Equifax hack late last year. You can check out the episode here.
