Eric Vishria (born 1979) is a general partner at

Benchmark Benchmark may refer to: Business and economics * Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations * Benchmark price * Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices Science and technology * Benchmark (surveying), a point of known elevati ...

, a

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

firm based in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

. Previously, he was CEO and co-founder of

Rockmelt Rockmelt is a discontinued proprietary social media web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria based on the Google Chromium project, incorporating social media features such as Facebook chat, Twitter notifications and widgetised areas f ...

and served as vice president at Yahoo following Yahoo's acquisition of Rockmelt.

Career

Vishria graduated from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

at age 19 with a B.S. in mathematical and computational science and a minor in human biology. He began his career in investment banking at Broadview International and got his first entrepreneurial experience as an early employee at Loudcloud and later

Opsware Opsware, Inc. was a software company based in Sunnyvale, California, that offered products for server and network device provisioning, configuration, and management targeted toward enterprise customers. Opsware had offices in New York City, Redm ...

. When Opsware was acquired by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

in 2007 for $1.65 billion, Vishria was serving as VP of marketing. After the acquisition, Eric became vice president of the products, software, technology solutions group in HP Software. In October 2008, Vishria left HP to co-found

RockMelt Rockmelt is a discontinued proprietary social media web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria based on the Google Chromium project, incorporating social media features such as Facebook chat, Twitter notifications and widgetised areas f ...

with

Tim Howes Tim Howes (born September 21, 1963) is a software engineer, entrepreneur and author. He is the co-creator of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the Internet standard for accessing directory servers. He co-founded enterprise soft ...

, and launched the RockMelt social browser in November 2010. In 2013,

was acquired by

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

for a reported $60–70 million, where Vishria started working as a

VP. In 2014, Vishria joined

as a general partner, the first partner addition in over 6 years. In November 2014, Vishria led Benchmark's investment in Confluent, an open-source data platform built around

Apache Kafka Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency plat ...

. In 2015, he led Benchmark’s investments in Bugsnag, an automated crash-detection platform, and Amplitude, a provider of mobile and Web-based analytics that tracks user behavior. In 2016, Vishria led the firm’s investment in Contentful, a content management platform.

References

1979 births Living people Stanford University alumni 21st-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1970s-stub