Max Ventilla
General Partner at Offline Ventures
Max Ventilla
General Partner at Offline Ventures
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
General Partner
2022 - Current
I'm one of five General Partners at Offline Ventures. I focus on our venture studio. I also support the fund's broader fundraising, strategy, investing, and portfolio company support.
Co-Founder, Head of Product
2022
Running a next generation product studio in partnership with Offline Ventures. Leaning into the future of work and building better technology to improve the human experience.
VP, Strategy and New Frontiers
2020 - 2021
- Led ongoing strategic cadence and 2022 strategic planning for Dropbox - Led machine learning - Led internal product incubator - Co-led Dropbox's $165m acquisition of DocSend
Interim Chief Product Officer
2019 - 2020
- Worked with Founding team of infrastructure focused private equity fund, spun out of Alphabet - Led technical work around SIP's autonomous vehicle focus area, co-led creation of Cavnue
Co-Founder and CEO
2013 - 2019
- Founded AltSchool - Raised $200m in capital from top tier investors - Led product strategy
Head of Personalization
2011 - 2013
• Reported to Alan Eustace (SVP of Knowledge) as the product lead for cross-Google personalization • Recruited the initial team and grew that team more than ten fold over 18 months; built massive new infrastructure to connect the signed-in user experiences across all major products and to underpin significant new user offerings (i.e., Google Now) • Was the product lead for more than a dozen major in-product personalization launches, affecting hundreds of billions of daily user interactions in aggregate • Helped negotiate Google's legal and policy iterations around privacy through a combination of user-driven design and large scale backend improvements
Sr. Product Manager
2010 - 2011
• Was one of the first 6 people working on Google+, reporting to Bradley Horowitz (VP of G+ Product); helped define initial strategy and secure executive buy-in for Google's significant new social initiative • Built up and led various teams working on cross-Google aspects of G+ (e.g., Google's unified header, multi-user signin, user notifications...) • Was the product lead for six large scale infrastructure / feature launches, reaching tens of billions of daily page views in aggregate across more than 100 countries • Led various initiatives related to the 2011 Googlewide redesign of all major products (see goo.gl/eq2no)
Co-Founder and CEO
2007 - 2010
• Founded and conceived of new startup (vark.com) to connect people in real time to the right person in their extended social / professional network to answer any question • Raised $7.5m, comprising a Series A round led by August Capital and a seed round including Mark Andreessen, Rajeev Motwani, Michael Dearing, Ron Conway, and many other top tier angels • Recruited team of more than 25 engineers, research scientists, designers, and tech. ops. professionals • Chosen as one of BusinessWeek's top young tech entrepreneurs in 2009 (see goo.gl/Ypbih) • Completed sale of Aardvark to Google within 6 months of public launch (see goo.gl/ni14k)
Senior Associate
2006 - 2007
• Part of 15 person internal strategic consulting team • Focused on monetization intitiatives and authored quarterly monetization summary for Google's BOD
VP, Business Development
2003 - 2005
• Reported directly to Trader's CEO on a four person team responsible for all mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and financings undertaken by $2 billion market cap global classified advertising company • Principally involved in negotiating $250m share purchase, while assisting separate $180m purchase, to increase founding CEO’s ownership to 72%; shares tripled between May 2003 and September 2005 • Worked extensively to coordinate regional centers for Internet development, standardize search engine optimization, roll-out pay for performance functionality, and focus web-only real estate offers • Sourced and led partnerships, joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions ranging from $2-60m in Croatia, Canada, Hungary, Spain, Poland, Italy, Holland, France, Russia, and India • Supported $450m divestiture of Trader's Australian businesses • Managed lawyers and advisers on six separate financings, raising over $700 million in total capital
Associate Fund Manager
2002 - 2003
Principal for $1m piece of larger growth fund focused on Biotech and Internet; achieved >30% returns
Education
MBA (full merit scholarship)
2003 - 2006
BS
1998 - 2002