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Announcing the Unusual Guide for Raising Seed and Series A Capital
Talks about Startup, Founders and Fundraising
JV
John Vrionis
Managing Partner at Unusual Ventures
Menlo Park, California
Overview
John Vrionis is the Founder and Managing Partner of Unusual Ventures in Menlo Park, California, with a background in Product Management and Venture Capital. He has a successful track record of investing in innovative companies like Vivun and Relyance AI, focusing on sectors like Web3/Crypto, Consumer Internet, and Enterprise, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Vrionis previously served as a General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and has held key roles in notable companies like Determina, Inc. (acquired by VMware), showcasing his expertise in entrepreneurship and strategic partnerships within the tech industry.
Work Experience
Founder and Managing Partner
2018 - Current
Unusual Ventures invests in pre-seed, seed and Series A stage enterprise software companies. Our mission is to redefine early stage investing and raise the bar for what entrepreneurs should expect from investment partners during the formation years. Seed/Early Investor in 16 billion dollar+ exits and financings including: Arctic Wolf Networks, Affirmed Networks (acquired by MSFT), AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco), Cockroach Labs, Heptio (acquired by VMware), Gusto, Liftoff.IO, Mulesoft (MULE acquired by Salesforce), Nicira (acquired by VMware), Nimble Storage (NMBL acquired by HP), Pinterest (PINS), Pliant (acquired by SanDisk), Sourcegraph and Tabular (acquired by Databricks). Current investments include Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, CO2 AI, Harness, Hallow, Qdrant, Relyance.ai, Traceable, Vivun, and others.
Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital offering hands-on support and expertise to startups on their early-stage journey.
General Partner
2006 - 2017
Early Investor in Affirmed Networks (acquired by MSFT), AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco), Heptio (acquired by VMware), Mulesoft (MULE acquired by Salesforce), Nicira (acquired by VMware), Nimble Storage (NMBL acquired by HP), Pliant (acquired by SanDisk), Sourcegraph and Arctic Wolf Networks.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that engages in consumer, enterprise, technology, and cleantech markets.
Product Management
2004 - 2005
Product management team working on host based intrusion prevention product.
Director of Product Management
2003 - 2005
• Joined as 5th employee. Assisted with product buildout and creating the go to market playbook. • Created affiliate strategy. Built and managed team with 150 representatives, structured compensation schedules for internal and external sales channels, and created joint product marketing materials.
Achieve provides digital personal finance tools to help clients with their financial well-being.
Raised $1,283,700,000.00 from Silicon Valley Bank and O’Connor Capital Solutions.
Sr. Associate
2000 - 2003
While completing Masters in Computer Science I worked with ABN AMRO Ventures to invest in early and growth stage IT companies
Soccer
1997 - 1999