Peter Sonsini

Venture Advisor, Menlo Park

Pete Sonsini is a Venture Advisor at NEA. Pete was previously head of the firm’s Enterprise Software investing practice. His primary focus is on early-stage software investing, in many cases as the very first investor in the company. Some of his current investments include Anyscale, Conviva, Databricks, FabFitFun, Forethought, Instabase, Matroid, Nefeli, Plasmic, PlayVS, Sisu, Splashtop, StreamSets and Yubico. Past exits include Eucalyptus (HP), Lattice Engines (Dun & Bradstreet), Lithium (Vista), Nginx (F5), Pentaho (Hitachi), PortAuthority (Websense), StormPath (OKTA), Teracent (Google), Upstart (UPST) and Xensource (Citrix Systems).

Prior to NEA Pete was on the executive staff at VMware where he struck the company’s initial strategic partnerships and grew annual sales through OEMs from $0-$40M in four years. Pete ran product management at Mirapoint and worked in sales and marketing at Hewlett-Packard, including Worldwide Product Manager for the mid-range server business. Pete began his career at Montgomery Securities in the Technology Corporate Finance group. He received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and his BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of the 1988 Collegiate National Championship varsity rugby team.