Eric Vishria (born 1979) is a general partner at Benchmark, a

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

firm based in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Count ...

. Previously, he was CEO and co-founder of

Rockmelt Rockmelt is a discontinued proprietary social media web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria based on the Google Chromium project, incorporating social media features such as Facebook chat, Twitter notifications and widgetised areas fo ...

and served as vice president at Yahoo following Yahoo's acquisition of Rockmelt.

Career

Vishria graduated from Stanford University at age 19 with a B.S. in mathematical and computational science and a minor in human biology. He began his career in investment banking at Broadview International and got his first entrepreneurial experience as an early employee at Loudcloud and later Opsware. When Opsware was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.65 billion, Vishria was serving as VP of marketing. After the acquisition, Eric became vice president of the products, software, technology solutions group in HP Software. In October 2008, Vishria left HP to co-found

RockMelt Rockmelt is a discontinued proprietary social media web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria based on the Google Chromium project, incorporating social media features such as Facebook chat, Twitter notifications and widgetised areas fo ...

with

Tim Howes Tim Howes (born September 21, 1963) is a software engineer, entrepreneur and author. He is the co-creator of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the Internet standard for accessing directory servers. He co-founded enterprise so ...

, and launched the RockMelt social browser in November 2010. In 2013,

was acquired by

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

for a reported $60–70 million, where Vishria started working as a

VP. In 2014, Vishria joined Benchmark as a general partner, the first partner addition in over 6 years. In November 2014, Vishria led Benchmark's investment in Confluent, an open-source data platform built around

Apache Kafka Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency pla ...

. In 2015, he led Benchmark’s investments in Bugsnag, an automated crash-detection platform, and Amplitude, a provider of mobile and Web-based analytics that tracks user behavior. In 2016, Vishria led the firm’s investment in Contentful, a content management platform.

References

1979 births Living people Stanford University alumni 21st-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1970s-stub