General Catalyst Partners has appointed Donald Fischer as its newest venture partner.
In this role, Fischer will identify and lead investments in early stage enterprise companies.
Fischer joins General Catalyst after five years at Greylock Partners where he most recently focused on leading investments in big data, open source, cloud, and other enterprise technology markets.
“Donald has a great mix of operational experience and a proven track record of leading investments in winning companies,” says Larry Bohn, managing director at General Catalyst. “Donald’s a natural addition to our enterprise-focused investment team and he exemplifies our philosophy of entrepreneurs investing in entrepreneurs. We look forward to having him on board to continue our track record of investing in early stage companies that can transform industries and become market leaders.”
During his tenure at Greylock, Fischer hatched Typesafe, a scalable software platform for multicore processors and cloud. He led Greylock's Series A investment in the company and served as CEO for its first year of operations.
Prior to joining Greylock, he was vice president and general manager of online services at Red Hat, where he oversaw new product launches including Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. Before that, he led product management for Red Hat’s flagship Enterprise Linux product line, a commercial open source operating system. Earlier in his career, Fischer held consulting and development roles at search pioneer Inktomi (acquired by Yahoo) and Oracle.
“The team at General Catalyst has built a premier brand that’s on the rise within the venture community. Its bi-coastal presence will give me the opportunity to work with enterprise tech companies coming out of New England, which has always been a strong suit for the region, while also providing a platform to tap into the innovation coming out of Silicon Valley,” says Fischer. “I know there are great things ahead for GC, and I’m thrilled to be part of the team.”
