Jacob Andreou, Snap’s head of growth and previously head of product, is leaving the social media company after 8 years to join Greylock as General Partner. The exec announced his transition plans via Twitter after noting that he would be leaving Snap in May to focus on collaborating with the “next generation of consumer founders”.
After starting as a Design Engineer, Andreou had served in different roles at Snap over the years, from May 2015 to July 2022, including Vice President of Product, Director of Product and Growth, and Director of Growth. In July 2022, he was reassigned to Senior Vice President of Growth as part of a broader realignment of Snap’s management team. In this role, Andreou was responsible for Snapchat’s monetization, growth operations and data science products.
Like Axios reported last year, the shakeup was designed to prioritize monetization and growth at the Snapchat creator. In addition to the changes, Snap also moved Jack Brody, VP of Product, to a role where he would oversee all of Snap’s product innovation, including teams for the Snapchat app and its hardware division, Snap Lab. In addition, the company had hired ex-Googler Biswanath Panda as VP of ad engineering and Lars Hirsch as VP of ad product, who had spent time in ad product divisions at Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
Before joining Snap, Andreou co-founded and led product at analytics platform ThinkAkili from May 2012 to March 2015.
In his departure announcement, the exec thanked the team and Evan [Spiegel, CEO of Snap] for the “honour of a lifetime” and for being able to “help build such an impactful product”, adding that the company had changed his life.
A profile with Fortune noted that Andreou, who is 29, had already made some angel investments while at Snap, including in startups like In Search Of and with the creator app Captions.AI, which was founded by former Snap employees. But he will now be able to focus on consumer tech, and specifically the influencer and creator market and other AI startups. Greylock has investments in a number of consumer technology companies, included Discord, Figma, Coinbase, Nextdoor, Roblox and others.
