Jason Pressman

Jason Pressman is a Managing Director of Shasta Ventures. He has extensive experience with venture-backed startups—as an executive， advisor and investor. Prior to joining Shasta Ventures in 2005 Jason was an early employee at Walmart.com， a venture-backed company where he served as vice president of strategy， business development and operations. In that role， Jason helped build the business into one of the leading commerce sites on the Web. Before Walmart.com， Jason worked as an investment banker at Alex. Brown， advising start-ups on financings and mergers and acquisitions. Jason earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He also holds a BS in finance from the University of Maryland. His current areas of interest include cloud computing， SaaS， online and mobile consumer services， and advertising technology.

When I meet with entrepreneurs for the first time I want to hear about how they think about the challenges they’re facing or are going to face. I want see how they think about things and if they’re iterative. I also seek to understand a team’s passion for， and focus on， its customers， as I believe that maniacal customer focus is core to successful businesses.

I view myself as a service provider to the entrepreneur and I love having the opportunity to help them solve problems in real time. The CEOs of companies I’m involved with call me at all times of the day to talk about all sorts of things， including strategic issues， recruiting matters， business development and sometimes just to vent. I like helping evaluate what’s working and not working and how you can improve it and make it better. I genuinely want to be a thought partner.