We’re thrilled to welcome Sam Fold and Aner Mazur to the early stage team in London as Entrepreneurs in Residence.
At Accel, we partner early with the most ambitious founders on their mission to build global category-defining companies and support them for the duration of their journeys. Having opened our London office almost 25 years ago, we’ve been fortunate enough to partner with hundreds of Europe and Israel’s startups and know that it takes more than just financial support to scale them into global success stories. Teams need access to the skills and experience of those who have experienced the startup journey firsthand and both Sam and Aner have such learnings in abundance. Now, as part of the Accel team, they’ll be able to share their knowledge on creating and scaling companies with the next generation of entrepreneurs. In addition, Sam and Aner will be working closely with our investment team, sourcing and assessing new investment opportunities, and building on our Prepared Mind work on areas including the modern data stack (Sam) and cybersecurity (Aner). Their knowledge and deep networks in their areas of expertise will be invaluable.
Most recently, Sam was VP of Engineering at Checkout.com. Here, he led the company’s critical Machine Learning and Data Engineering, Data Analytics Engineering and Product Analytics, and DevOps, Developer Tooling and Experience teams through Checkout.com’s journey from approximately 200 to 2,200 employees. In addition to these platform teams, Sam also led several Product Engineering teams and was responsible for a team of around 120 people, a $10M+ budget and setting the technology direction and strategy. Sam also led technical due diligence for the company’s M&A process for several successful acquisitions.
Prior to Checkout.com, Sam spent a decade in the gaming industry at companies such as Blizzard Entertainment. Here, he led the engineering team that designed, built and deployed the company’s first production system using machine learning, running on a Hadoop and Kafka stack.
Aner is an experienced product leader and innovator, with more than 20 years’ experience leading product management and engineering teams at a number of category defining startups. Aner is no stranger to the Accel team, having spent almost six years at Snyk as CPO and then SVP Market Strategy. As CPO, Aner took Snyk from a node open source scanning product to a full-fledged developer security platform that leads the application security testing category. Aner also led its marketing and developer relations in the first few years to drive Snyk’s product-led GTM motion, getting from pre-revenue to $200M+ ARR when he left. Aner also led product due diligence and the successful integrations of the company’s six acquisitions during his tenure. Following this, he led the company’s long-term strategy to drive the developer security revolution.
Before Snyk, Aner was senior director product management at Outbrain and director of product management at omnichannel marketing platform Kenshoo (now Skai). Aner also spent more than four years years at VMware, leading the VMware APM suite requirements and design following the Bhive acquisition
We look forward to working with you both!