Snap’s head of growth and previously longtime product head Jacob Andreou is leaving the social media company after eight years to join Greylock as a general partner. The exec announced his transition plans via a Twitter post noting he would be leaving Snap in May to focus on partnering with the “next generation of consumer founders.”
After starting as a design engineer, Andreou served in various roles at Snap over the years, from May 2015 through July 2022, including also vice president of Product, director of Product and Growth, and director of Growth. In July 2022, he was shifted to senior vice president of Growth as part of a broader reshuffling of Snap’s executive team. In this position, Andreou was responsible for Snapchat’s monetization products, growth operations and data science.
As Axios reported last year, the shakeup had been designed to prioritize monetization and growth at the Snapchat maker. Among the changes, Snap also moved Jack Brody, VP of Product, to a role that would have him overseeing all of Snap’s product innovation, including teams across the Snapchat app and the hardware division, Snap Lab. In addition, the company hired ex-Googler Biswanath Panda as its VP of ads engineering and Lars Hirsch as its VP of ads product, who had spent time in ad product divisions at Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
Before working at Snap, Andreou co-founded and led product at analytics platform ThinkAkili from May 2012 through March 2015.
In his departure announcement, the exec thanked the team and Evan [Spiegel, CEO of Snap] for the “honor of a lifetime” and for getting to “help build such an impact full product” adding the company had changed his life.
A profile with Fortune noted Andreou, who is 29, had already done some angel investing while at Snap, including in startups like In Search Of and with creator app Captions.AI, which had been founded by former Snap employees. But he will now be able to focus on consumer technology, and particularly the influencer and creator market and other AI startups. Greylock has investments in a number of consumer tech companies, including Discord, Figma, Coinbase, Nextdoor, Roblox and others.
Snap exec and head of growth Jacob Andreou heads to Greylock by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
