Eric Wolford Venture Partner, Accel Partners

Accel Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm focusing on early and growth stage venture investments, announced the addition of Eric Wolford as venture partner.

 Most recently he served as president, products Group, Riverbed Technology, and was recently appointed to the Riverbed board of directors as well as the board’s strategy committee.

During his 10-plus years at Riverbed, he led a number of functions including products, marketing and development that helped to take the company public and deliver growth from zero to $1 billion in annual revenue.

He will be working with the Accel Partners enterprise IT and data-driven software investment team and will be responsible for evaluating and investing, and building early stage companies. Additionally, he will help advise the firm’s portfolio companies on a range of operational issues including strategy, product development and marketing.

“Over the past 15 years we’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Eric as Accel invested in companies where he played important management roles,” said Ping Li, partner, Accel Partners. “Eric has a unique ability to align product development strategy and market needs with remarkable timing. We have enormous respect for his accomplishments in creating new innovative products and are excited that he’ll be joining our team.”

Accel Partners has long had a focus on enterprise software and IT, with many early investments in data center companies such as Nimble Storage, Imperva, Fusion-io and Riverbed. It continues to identify innovative start-ups in enterprise, and has invested in companies including Atlassian, BlueJeans Network, Cloudera, Couchbase, Lookout, ScaleArc, Sumo Logic, RelateIQ, Tenable and Trifacta.

“I am pleased to be joining the world-class venture team at Accel. Over the course of 15 years and through three different companies I have had the enjoyable opportunity to work with many talented folks at Accel who have invested both considerable time and resources in me and our various collaborations,” said Wolford. “The passion to identify and help entrepreneurs develop the next big thing is clearly a driving force we all share. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of the next chapter of Accel’s success.”

Wolford brings more than 25 years of deep operational, product development and product marketing experience to Accel. Prior to Riverbed, he served as SVP of products and marketing for netVmg (acquired by Internap) and VP product management and marketing for Fast Forward which was acquired by Inktomi, where he served as VP of product marketing. He began his career with AT&T where he rose through the ranks and held a number of product management, product marketing and business development roles during his time there.

He currently sits on the board of directors for BitTorrent and Jut, both Accel companies.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in pre-medicine from Pepperdine University and an MBA from the New York University Stern School of Business.