Peter Sonsini

General Partner, Menlo Park

Pete joined NEA in 2005 and is the head of the firm’s Enterprise practice group. 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 Conviva, Databricks, FabFitFun, Forethought, GuideSpark, Instabase, Lattice Engines, MapR Technologies, Matroid, Nefeli, Nginx, PlayVS, Splashtop and Yubico. Past exits include Audience (DIRECTV), Eucalyptus (HP), Lithium (Vista), Pentaho (Hitachi), PortAuthority (Websense), StormPath (OKTA), Teracent (Google), Tintri (TNTRQ), and Xensource (Citrix Systems).

Prior to NEA Pete was on Diane Greene’s 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.

Interests

Experience

  • UC Berkeley
    1986–1990 UC Berkeley
  • NU
    1994–1995 Northwestern University
  • Novell
    1995 Novell
  • 1995–1996 Northwestern University
  • HP
    1996–1998 Hewlett-Packard
  • Mirapoint
    1998–2001 Mirapoint
  • VMware
    2001–2005 VMware
  • NEA
    2005–Current NEA

Companies