Since expanding to Silicon Valley from Boston seven years ago, North Bridge Venture Partners has flown a bit under the venture capital radar. It's avoided investing in sexy social-media startups, and its offices in San Mateo are miles from VC-choked Sand Hill Road.
But with a venture arms race seemingly under way to add big-name partners, North Bridge has notched a significant score: On Wednesday, the firm will announce the addition of former Facebook vice president Jonathan Heiliger.
"It's a big win for us," said Paul Santinelli, the North Bridge partner who's known Heiliger for close to 15 years, since they worked together at early Web-hosting company GlobalCenter.
After co-founding GlobalCenter at age 19, Heiliger moved on to a number of high-profile posts. He was the fifth employee at Loudcloud, the cloud computing pioneer launched by Marc Andreessen.
He was chief of engineering for Walmart's website. And during his four years as Facebook's head of technical operations, he oversaw the social network's explosive growth from 35 million users to more than 800 million.
Andy Bechtolsheim, the legendary technologist who co-founded Sun Microsystems, notes that Heiliger's signature achievements include devising Facebook's Open Compute Initiative, which saw the company create more energy-efficient servers and
data centers -- then share the technology for free with others. "Nobody before him ever thought of hardware as something you can open source," said Bechtolsheim. "It's just complete out-of-the-box thinking."
But Heiliger left Facebook last summer -- leaving potentially millions of dollars in unvested stock options on the table -- because, he said, "My job had gone from working with engineers on whiteboards to business processes. I really missed working with early-stage companies."
After deciding on a course in venture capital, he spent several months talking with venerable Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, as well as Andreessen's upstart firm, which has become a major Silicon Valley player.
But ultimately, he said, he was drawn to North Bridge's relatively small size and its culture. "I've known a number of the partners here for years," he said. And he believes there's an opportunity for him to carve out a niche and help push the firm into the consumer space.
North Bridge has tended to focus on enterprise technology and on startups that provide the infrastructure beneath the Internet. "The reason we haven't done consumer is we've lacked domain expertise," said Santinelli.
In Sik Rhee, a Loudcloud co-founder who's now a general partner at Rembrandt Ventures, said North Bridge's successful wooing of Heiliger not only will likely raise some eyebrows in the venture community but could also lift the firm in the valley pecking order. "This is going to give them the potential to participate in the best deals," Rhee said, noting Heiliger's "brand name" among entrepreneurs as well as the power of his Rolodex. "The people who worked for him at Loudcloud are now the people running the entire infrastructure at Salesforce and Twitter."
Heiliger isn't coming cold to the venture business: After GlobalCenter was acquired by Global Crossing in 1999, he set up the company's in-house venture arm. At various times since, he's advised Accel Partners and Sequoia, and as a longtime angel investor, he sits on the board of Jive Software and is an adviser to high-profile startups Box and Square.
A baby-faced 35-year-old, Heiliger grew up in Palo Alto. His mother was a photography professor, his dad a political scientist at the Hoover Institution. "I wanted to rebel against my parents, so I got into computers," he said with a smile.
Ed Anderson, who co-founded North Bridge in 1994, said the Heiliger hire is just the first step in a plan to beef up its Silicon Valley offices. "The serious firms out there are going to see more of us," he said from Boston.
Bechtolsheim said Heiliger represents what he called a new breed of "Renaissance venture capitalists" like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. "Most VCs I've met in my life are MBAs or financially focused," he said. "Jonathan really drills in on the technology. There's few venture capitalists who can do that."
Contact Peter Delevett at 408-271-3638 or pdelevett@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercwiretap.
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