Paul Holland is a partner at Foundation Capital and an expert in venture capital, taking startups from zero to $110M. He's also the producer of a critically acclaimed documentary and a champion of living a 'green' lifestyle.

Three Things We Learned

About the time Paul was preparing to build a new home, he attended a TED Talk by Bill McDonough, a leader in LEED design, technology and construction. His focus became environmentally regenerative design LEED for Home. His home "Tah.Mah.La" is the greenest home in America. Paul sees the future of green and how the current mindset of water and conservation has to change to save the land as we know it. 

Paul is lucky enough to own a part of Netflix. Around 2003 his buddy, one of the sharpest software minds of our generation was mailing DVD's from him home. He wanted a business he could easily run from his house in Santa Cruz. Many of the smart minds around him considered it a hokey business but we all know now what Reed Hastings built and 'the rest is history'.

Paul says it's important to associate with really successful people. But it's not always easy. A lot of the time, those people are not the ones you are socially comfortable with. He was fortunate and smart enough himself to associate with successful people and those early connections led him to his current place in life. Now where he's at, the Silicon Valley, it's a way of life and people are very comfortable combing social and commerce. It's become the way of life there.

Paul Holland is a partner at Foundation Capital where he invests in IT, consumer, and digital energy sectors.

 

Paul currently serves on the boards of Homesuite, Peerspace, SkyCure, Dreambox Learning, KiK and InsideView.

Past investments include Chegg (CHGG), MobileIron (MOBL), Coverity (acquired by Synopsys), Averail (acquired by MobileIron), Conformia (acquired by Oracle), Ketera (acquired by Rearden Commerce), RouteScience (acquired by Avaya), Talking Blocks (acquired by Hewlett-Packard), and TuVox (acquired by West).

Before Foundation Capital, he worked at -- and helped take public -- two software start-ups, Kana Communications with Mark Gainey, and Pure Software with Reed Hastings.
 

His two start-ups ended up being worth over $13 billion in aggregate.

He’s also the past president of the Western Association of Venture Capital.

 

Paul is co-executive producer of Something Ventured, a critically acclaimed documentary on the origins of the venture capital industry.

 

http://foundationcapital.com

http://www.tahmahlah.com/