Bob Lisbonne is a Venture Partner in our Silicon Valley office, where he serves on a number of Matrix portfolio company Boards of Directors.

Bob led early stage investments as a General Partner at Matrix from 2001- 2008, and as a General Partner at Crosspoint Venture Partners from 1999-2001. His current and former Board seats include Access360 (enterprise software, acquired by IBM), Consera (infrastructure software, acquired by HP), eHealth.com (consumer internet, NASDAQ: EHTH), Euclid Media (internet video), LucidEra (software as a service), PostPath (messaging software, acquired by Cisco), Renkoo (consumer internet), Tealeaf (enterprise software), and Xign (software as a service, acquired by JPMorgan).

Prior to working as a venture capitalist, Bob spent his career as an operating executive in software and internet companies. He worked from 1995-1999 at Netscape, where, as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the browser division, he helped lead Netscape's famous "browser wars." He managed all engineering and product management for browsers, email clients, and HTML editors that garnered 100 million users and pioneered the widespread use of the web.

In 1998 he embraced open source and launched mozilla.org, representing the first time a major commercial software company had adopted an open source strategy. Over ten years later, mozilla has enjoyed considerable success with its Firefox browser, and Bob serves on the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation.

Before Netscape, Bob was VP Marketing at startup Collabra, whose "groupware" software sparked a continuing interest in online collaboration. In the early 1990s, Bob worked at Apple Computer's Claris subsidiary where he launched and directed the ClarisWorks product line. In the 1980s, he worked as an investment banker in the high tech group at Goldman Sachs, advising Silicon Valley companies on IPOs and mergers & acquisitions.

Bob attended Stanford University, where he earned MBA, MA, and BA degrees and did graduate studies in Computer Science.

These days Bob prefers Ruby on Rails for his internet projects, and enjoys experimenting with Arduino for embedded/electronics projects. When he's not on his computer, he's an avid cyclist and private pilot.

Contact Bob at: blisbonne [at] matrixpartners.com
Assistant is Hilary Benjamin: hbenjamin [at] matrixpartners.com