Before Chronosphere sold to Palo Alto Networks for $3.35B, founders Martin Mao and Rob Skillington spent months working out which investor they actually wanted. Greylock’s Jerry Chen found them first, through an engineering blog post about M3, the open-source observability project the pair built at Uber, and reached out before they had committed to starting a company.
The episode tells both sides of that courtship: the 85-page business plan Chen read, the cross-country trips, and the diligence the founders ran on their prospective board member. Greylock led the 2019 Series A and stayed through to the exit.
