Karim Faris

General Partner

Karim has been with GV since its inception. He leads the firm’s investments in enterprise software and analytics as the IT stack reorganizes and learning algorithms extend our ability to gain insight from large amounts of data. Karim also has a passion for security innovation at a time when those technology shifts are continuously expanding vulnerable surface areas.

Before joining GV, Karim served on Google’s corporate development team and held business and product development positions at Level 3 Communications. Earlier in his career, Karim took on various product and marketing roles at Intel, initially on the i486 and later as product manager for the Pentium processor. He started his career at Siemens as a software engineer working on the first vehicle navigation system for BMW.

Karim is drawn to mission-driven founders with a healthy disregard for the impossible. “I find it very rewarding to team up at the early stages of challenging the status quo, and helping founders advance ideas into invaluable companies.”

He started partnering with entrepreneurs near the trough of the market in 2002 when he joined Atlas Venture. “Success was at a premium then,” he says, “I had to be a grounded optimist. The lessons learned from that period — through more failures than triumphs — were invaluable. I gained a deeper appreciation for the founder journey and what it takes to build an enduring business.”

Karim holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. in computer engineering from Brown University, where he published several papers on neural networks.