Jonathan Heiliger

I started my technical career by rebelling against my parents when I was nine years old by staying up all night to game, hack, and program a new computer. A few years later, I taught myself 3D computer graphics and IP networking while working for EPRI and Stanford University, the local hub for the Internet’s precursor, the NSFNET. At 19, I helped start GlobalCenter, one of the first web hosting providers, with initial customers such as CNN, Netscape, Playboy, and Yahoo!

In January, I started Vertex Ventures with long-time collaborator Insik Rhee. Our vision is to catalyze and partner with brilliant founders building business-focused applications. Before Vertex, I was a General Partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, from April 2012 to November 2014. During my tenure I started the seed practice and led investments in Lytro, Periscope.io, Quora, and Ravel Law, in addition to co-founding Coolan.

Prior to NBVP, I worked at Facebook, where I led global infrastructure, site architecture, and internal systems as VP Infrastructure & Technical Operations, from 2007 until 2012. During that time Facebook grew from 35 million to over 800 million users. Facebook witnessed unprecedented scale and velocity, one of our most impactful decisions was defying the status quo and sharing our lessons learned in infrastructure with the world through 200+ open source projects, in addition forming the Open Compute Project.

Before that, I held executive engineering roles at Wal-Mart and Danger (acquired by Microsoft). I also spent several years as Chief Operating Officer for Loudcloud (which became Opsware and was later acquired by HP). Earlier in my career, I co-founded and was CTO of GlobalCenter, and later founded Global Crossing’s venture capital group. While scaling GlobalCenter, we saw an opportunity to build the world’s first native-optical IP network. When others were adopting ATM, we chose the path less traveled with a new approach.

I currently serve on the board of directors of DuPont Fabros (DFT), Jive Software (JIVE), and Webmonsters. I have individually invested in and actively help several companies, including Cloudera, Coravin, Dropbox, Oscar, Square, and ThousandEyes.