Brian O’Malley

General Partner, Forerunner Ventures

Brian O’Malley is a General Partner at Forerunner Ventures. He was most recently a Partner on Accel Partners’ early stage team. Previously Brian led Battery’s Seed & Early Stage practices, while focusing on investments in eCommerce, online marketplaces and internet applications. During his tenure at Battery, he has invested in Bazaarvoice (NASDAQ: BV), Brightedge, Coupa, Duetto, H.BLOOM, Insitu (acquired by Boeing), J. Hilburn, Joor, HotelTonight, Loosecubes, Peerflix (acquired by Live Universe), Serena & Lily, Skullcandy (NASDAQ: SKUL), Sociable Labs, Sosh, Sprig, TradeKing, Viddy (acquired by Fullscreen Media) and World Golf Tour. He prides himself on hustling to find unique companies and new markets before other investors recognize the opportunity. Prior to Battery, Brian spent several years at Bowstreet, Inc. (acquired by NYSE: IBM), as Director of West Coast Technical Sales and earlier as the company’s Technical Evangelist preaching the future of web service-based APIs. Earlier in his career, Brian assisted founding teams at Matrics, Inc. (acquired by NYSE: MOT) and Compoze Software (acquired by NASDAQ: ORCL) with go-to-market strategy and initial fundraising activities. He started his career as a web developer for Motorola Computer Group while only a sophomore in college. Brian has guest lectured on entrepreneurship at several top universities, including Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Stanford, UVA and Penn. He graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a Dual Concentration in Entrepreneurial Finance and Management. Brian has been named to Forbes’ Midas List VC Draft: Hot Prospects, as well as to AlwaysOn’s Power Players in Mobile and Power Players in The Cloud lists.

Articles by Brian O’Malley

The LinkedIn Playbook: How Startup Founders Can Stand Out & Scale

This LinkedIn Playbook is based on insights from a recent one-time Mucker Growth Session webinar featuring LinkedIn growth experts Alec Paul (Founder of SalesBrand) and Kyle Williams (Founder of Brickstack)....

DeepSeek vs OpenAI: Comparison Breakdown and What It Means For Your Tech Startup With Dan Cleary

In this recent webinar of our Mucker Growth Series, we discussed the evolving AI landscape with Dan Cleary, founder of PromptHub. He provided an in-depth breakdown of DeepSeek vs. OpenAI,...

Building Product Without Knowing Code With Adam New Waterson

In a deep dive into AI-driven product development, Adam New-Waterson, a former CMO turned Chief Product Officer and now solopreneur, shared how non-technical founders can harness the power of AI...

How To Build An Automated Sales Outreach Engine For Startups with ColdIQ

Many B2B startups (and even larger organizations) are unable to be successful with their outbound sales strategy because they take a lazy, “batch-and-blast” approach. In a recent Mucker Growth Series...

Navigating the AI Sales Tools Landscape To Grow Your Startup With Blue Bowen

We had the privilege of hosting, Eugene “Blue” Bowen, Research Principal from G2, one of the leading software marketplaces and review sites that cover a broad range of B2B solutions....

Compensation Benchmarks for Early Stage Startups with Peter Walker

In this Mucker Growth Session, Peter Walker from Carta reviews insights and compensation benchmarks for early stage startups gathered from Carta’s extensive dataset of nearly 50,000 startups. In the evolving...