Paula Skokowski
General Partner at Oxonian Ventures
Palo Alto, California
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder, General Partner
2016 - Current
Oxonian Ventures is the leading early-stage venture fund investing in Oxford alumni founded companies, using investment capital from Oxford alumni and affiliated institutions.
Co-Founder, Board Member
2017
Board Member
2020
Founding member of FirstBoard.io - a curated group of diverse Technology Leaders working together to add diversity to corporate boards.
We are a curated collective of female tech Founders, CXOs, and VP Operating Leaders.
Board Member - Alumni
2019 - 2024
Appointed to the University of Oxford Alumni Board to advise on increasing engagement with the 360,000+ Alumni around the world. Oxford has a 800 year history of teaching and is ranked as the #1 University in the world in the 2023 Times Higher Education Ranking.
Chief Marketing Officer - Cybersecurity
2020 - 2022
Led development of all marketing activities from the ground up, including messaging, positioning, digital marketing, product launch, and brand development, enabling first company wins in fintech, banking, gaming, social and mcommerce for location-based fraud prevention and frictionless mobile authentication solutions, $15.5M in Series A financing, and deployment in 200M+ devices.
Incognia is a next-generation identity solution that solves complex fraud, risk, and abuse problems.
Raised $46,499,967.00 from Valor Capital Group, Point72 Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Prosus Ventures and FJ Labs.
Chief Marketing Officer - Cybersecurity
2017 - 2019
Launched seven new products over two years for pioneering cybersecurity company in hardware-based authentication, increasing company valuation from $100M - $600M, $25M Series C. Led development of all marketing activities, including brand development, demand generation and communications strategy, hiring and developing a high performing team. IPO Oct, 2023.
Yubico protects logins with hardware devices like YubiKey, which offer secure and user-friendly two-factor and passwordless authentication.
Raised $292,197,914.00 from AMF, Marc Benioff, Bure Equity AB, New Enterprise Associates, Ram Shriram, Meritech Capital Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and The Valley Fund.
Vice President - Marketing, Brand.- Cybersecurity
2016 - 2017
Interim Vice President, Marketing and Global Brand, creating corporate positioning, messaging and brand strategy for VC-backed AI cybersecurity SaaS company. Company ranked by Deloitte as the #1 fastest-growing company in California; named by Fortune as one of the leading AI companies. Acquired for $1B by F5, Jan 2020.
Shape provides defense against malicious automated cyber-attacks on web and mobile applications.
Raised $183,000,000.00 from EPIC Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Top Tier Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins, C5 Capital, JetBlue Ventures and Focus Ventures.
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) - Information Security SaaS
2011 - 2016
Designed and executed all aspects of global go-to-market strategy, including new-category product definition, packaging, pricing, marketing and sales development. Enabled company to achieve 70% YOY growth, reach profitability and raise $12M late stage private equity funding, $500M valuation. Grew customer base from 25 to over 2000+ enterprise customers, 15M+ users. Recognized as Market Leader, Gartner MQ, Forrester Wave, Aragon Globe. Recruited and developed high performing team.
VP Marketing
2007 - 2011
Successfully achieved product/market fit. Designed, implemented and scaled all marketing and sales enablement from the ground up, including brand development, corporate messaging and positioning, analyst relations, content marketing, digital marketing, Marketo/Salesforce implementations and demand generation programs.
Kiteworks provides secure communication and file-sharing solutions for businesses and organizations.
Raised $592,010,901.00 from Insight Partners, Sixth Street and Bregal Sagemount.
VP Marketing - Voice Interface
2000 - 2002
Developed and launched go-to-market strategy for General Magic's VoiceXML-based development platform, raising $25M funding. Platform used for GM's Onstar Virtual Assistant, the first commercially available in-car conversational speech interface. Led corporate and product marketing in addition to managing the voice user interface design team.
Executive Director - IoT
1991 - 2000
Key contributor to company’s growth from first product launch to 4000+ customers and successful IPO. Echelon was an early market leader in IoT. Recruited 250+ companies worldwide, including Honeywell, Philips, GE, Johnson Controls, Motorola to partner in developing first IoT devices, interoperability standards and global co-branding initiative. (Acquired by Adesto in 2018)
Lumewave is a provider of wireless outdoor lighting control systems.