Article – December 3, 2015 – Executive recruiters Calibre One has placed Aaron Batalion, LivingSocial co-founder and former chief technology officer, as a venture partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners. He will focus on consumer investments for the firm. Lightspeed was an investor in LivingSocial, which was one of the first Silicon Valley tech companies to raise $1 billion. Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew is currently a board member of the company.
Mr. Batalion left LivingSocial in 2013 and has invested personally in startups like HONK, Walker & Company Brands and Shyp. Earlier in his career, he was a software architect for Accenture and before that was a software developer for Hewlett Packard.
“I’ve had the good fortune to know Jeremy Liew for many years, both personally and in the boardroom,” said Mr. Batalion in a blog. “Their team has been fortunate to back some incredible technology companies and are committed to working closely with founders. My experience in technology, customer growth, scaling teams, and international expansion will make me valuable to the founders I back.”
Lightspeed Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise and consumer sectors.
Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed and helped build more than 200 companies globally, many of which have become market leaders. The firm currently manages over $3 billion of committed capital and is currently investing out of Lightspeed X, a $635 million fund and Lightspeed Select, a $430 million fund.
“We are extremely grateful to our clients for allowing us the opportunity to serve them and are pleased to announce several recent marquee placements,” said Dan Grosh, a Calibre One managing partner. “It has been a banner year for our firm. We look forward to making a few additional and exciting placement announcements within the next few months.”
Calibre One has made several recent important placements in the sector, including David Rodman as EVP customer success at NetSuite, Aaron Batalion as partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Parker Barrile as chief product officer at Prosper Marketplace, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff as CMO at Mozilla, Todd Forrest as operating partner at Nokia Growth Partners, and Jason Marshall as SVP and CMO at Solarwinds.
Calibre One is an international boutique executive recruiting firm specializing in working with technology-centric businesses at all stages of development and has recently represented recognizable Fortune 500 companies like AMEX, Flex, eBay, Symantec, Fiserv & Hearst.
Contributed by Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor, Hunt Scanlon Media