Ian McNish

Angel Investor

2013 - Current

I’m keen to fund start-ups that are pioneering new markets or solving obvious needs and problems that haven’t been addressed yet. I also am interested in companies that are working on products that are more than a generation ahead of their contemporaries. Most of all I’m attracted to companies that drive discovery or have the potential to drastically reshape how people live their lives. When investing in companies I also look for teams that are just as passionate about building a business as their customers are about their product.

Partner & Mentor

2022

Investment Committee

2018

Mentor

2018 - 2019

Mentor

2014 - 2016

In order to build an efficient and stable complex system companies must have a deep understanding of how all of the bits work independently as well as how all of the components behave as a whole. Companies that are built to last take the time to evaluate how the data center, network, storage, computers, and software operate in the same ecosystem. I work with companies to take a look at how the services that monitor the stack, the processes that build and maintain it and the concepts that secure it integrate with the other pieces of the puzzle. My expertise is in helping international and hyper-growth companies take a step back, so we can work together to create the most efficient operations possible.

Director, Foundational Services

2013 - 2016

I spent my first ten months with Box as a technical advisor. I came on board full-time with the company in March of 2014. In my role as the Director of Foundational Services, my team worked to create, implement and maintain the growing company’s comprehensive network and data center strategy.

Mentor

2014 - 2016

At 500 Startups my mentoring activities are similar to those at StartX. 500 Startups is a seed fund and startup accelerator.

Principal Systems Architect and Member of the Founding Team

2002 - 2013

As part of the founding team, my first day in our “office” was in serial entrepreneur Reid Hoffman's apartment. We didn’t have a brand name, prototypes, company-owned or operated computers and we were in a market that had yet to be defined. During the ten years I was at LinkedIn we grew the company from zero users to over 225 million, from zero servers to over 12,000, from a handful of employees to more than 4,000. I was, and continue to be, proud to be part of the team that launched one of the most successful IPOs of the decade. In the beginning I was a Jack-of-all-trades who wore all of the IT and operations hats. My early projects included building out the first fully functional office as well as the site selection and build-out of our first data center. Over the years I performed site selection and design for more than 10MW of data center space across our first eight data centers, which spanned the globe, and lead the build-out of more than 5MW of data center space. For the first eight years of the company, I was responsible for the network architecture (WAN and LAN) and its build-out, which supported our first eight offices and our entire data center footprint. I also handled storage architecture and build-out. During many of those years I was also responsible for server architecture and build-out, along with all core services.

Senior UNIX System Administrator

2002 - 2003

I worked in the production operations group for six months, assisting in day-to-day site maintenance and capacity up-lift to support the growing travel web site. I then migrated to the IT group and primarily supported the staff’s big data initiatives and core services.

Senior Systems Architect

2001 - 2002

At MobileAria I was in the production operations group. During this time I maintained the proof of concept and initial data center infrastructure. In addition I performed data center site selection, build-out, migration and day-to-day maintenance of the second-generation infrastructure supporting the production website which included data center, network, storage and systems.