Google Ventures has hired the man behind Google Voice to build a new startup reports The New York Times.
Craig Walker will be Google Ventures’ first entrepreneur-in-residence. He co-founded GrandCentral, the service that became Google Voice, which gives people one phone number and routes their calls and voicemails to one place. Google bought GrandCentral for a reported $45 million in 2007 and since then, Mr. Walker has been the product manager for real-time communications at Google.
Entrepreneur-in-residence is one of those only-in-Silicon-Valley jobs. Smart people get paid to sit around and think about new ideas, and investors get the chance to join an entrepreneur early in a new project, betting that lightning will strike twice.
“Craig has been a really successful start-up entrepreneur in the past,” said Bill Maris, the managing partner of Google Ventures. “This business that we’re in as V.C.s is a social business, more about people than companies or products.”
As with most relationships between entrepreneurs-in-residence and venture firms, the idea is that Google will eventually fund Mr. Walker’s next start-up.
Mr. Walker said he [was] bouncing around a few ideas, but he would only speak vaguely about what they are.
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