Craig Sherman

Craig Sherman joined Meritech in 2011. He focuses primarily on digital media and consumer services. Craig has led the firm’s investments in Evernote, Zulily (acquired by HSN), Lynda.com (acquired by LinkedIn), Ariosa Diagnostics (acquired by Roche), and Guidespark.

Prior to Meritech, Craig was Chief Executive Officer of Gaia Interactive, which he grew from a 1/2 million to over a 20 million monthly visitor pioneer in social games and online communities. Prior to joining Gaia, Craig served as an EIR at Benchmark Capital. Previously, Craig was Chief Operating Officer of Ancestry.com (ACOM), where he helped lead the company’s pivot from a free family social network to a family history subscription service and grew the company from under $10 million to $150 million in sales and from tens of millions in losses to tens of millions in profits. Before Ancestry.com, Craig held senior positions at AIG: he was head of marketing and internet for all of AIG’s Japanese and Korean divisions totaling over $5 billion in sales; and the general manager of AIG’s property management software subsidiary, a $90 million sales company whose growth rate quadrupled during Craig’s tenure. Previous to AIG, Craig was Chief Executive Officer of Cendant Japan, a joint venture startup he founded with Cendant and Mitsubishi Corporation that he helped grow from inception to over $20 million in sales and profitability. Before that, he worked in product, marketing, finance and operations roles at Cendant during its growth from less than a $1 billion to over a $40 billion public company.

In his years at Cendant he ran travel, dining, health, commerce and pet consumer subscription services. But be sure to ask him about his most memorable job: 3pm-11:30pm call center rep in Dallas, TX.

Craig has personally invested in over a dozen startups including Ancestry, SurveyMonkey, Zillow, and Zipcar. In addition, Craig has held independent board and advisory roles with Homestead (prior to its sale to Intuit), Kongregate (GameStop), Logoworks (Hewlett Packard), Netquote (BankRate), and Photobucket (Fox). He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University.

Craig spends his “free” time with his son and daughter – hiking, playing soccer, doing puzzles and even some musical theater. After they go to sleep, he loves to meditate and read classic (AKA “old”) novels.