ATA Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm focusing on early stage, venture capital investments, has appointed digital industry veteran John Loiacono as Venture Partner.
Loiacono, known by many in the industry as "JohnnyL", has been a key executive in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley for over 25 years, including former roles as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Sun Microsystems, and more recently, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Adobe Systems’ Digital Media and Creative Solutions businesses.
"John’s industry-recognised status as a visionary in digital media and computing solutions ideally suits ATA’s investment objectives," says Hatch Graham, co-founder and Managing Director of ATA Ventures.
Throughout its current fund, ATA (A Team Approach) Ventures has established an investment focus on next-generation digital solutions for consumer and enterprise applications across a broad range of social markets, including entertainment, health, career, and financial.
Loiacono has been on the forefront of creating, developing, and deploying digital products to both consumer and enterprise markets for decades, primarily through his leadership at both Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems. In 2006, Loiacono took the helm of all Creative Solutions within Adobe, including such iconic brands as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Dreamweaver and Photoshop Lightroom. Under his leadership, revenues grew to over $2B and significant "social" and on-line innovations were created, such as Adobe’s Digital Publishing Platform and mobile extensions to the Photoshop.com desktop imaging franchise. Loiacono also managed the Digital Media businesses within Adobe, pioneering development of SaaS-based cloud infrastructure for mobile/tablet based authoring.
Prior to Adobe, Loiacono had a storied career at Sun Microsystems, including heading Sun’s software portfolio, which ranged from the Java runtime and tools suite, to Sun’s UNIX operating system (Solaris), to enterprise middleware and OpenSource, including the company’s open source productivity suite. His businesses totalled 5,000 employees and generated over $1B in revenue. Along with P&L responsibilities of Sun’s software portfolio, Loiacono served as Sun’s Chief Marketing Officer following numerous roles in marketing and sales.
Along with supporting ATA’s existing and new investments, Loiacono will play a key role in the firm’s next fund.
Loiacono says: "I’m excited to join ATA Ventures at such a historical crossroad in the behaviour of society, a point in time where digital solutions profoundly impact the vital needs of our daily lives, whether at home or work, and across all ages and cultures. I see this crossroad as an ideal time to make exceptional investments in next-generation solutions that supplant legacy processes ripe for change."
