Exclusive: VC firm IVP has hired Atlassian's top sales boss as it builds out its brain trust

• Kevin Egan, a former chief sales officer at Atlassian, has joined the venture-capital firm IVP.
• Egan worked in the trenches of Salesforce, Dropbox, and Slack in the early days of the cloud.
• At IVP, Egan will help close investments and assist portfolio companies with their sales strategy.

IVP, a 45-year-old venture-capital firm that has backed Slack, Coinbase, Glean, and Perplexity, is building out its brain trust with the addition of Kevin Egan as a venture partner. Egan stepped down as chief sales officer at Atlassian in August.

Egan is an enterprise sales guru who scaled Salesforce, Slack, and Dropbox in the early days of the cloud. Now he's joining one of the most enduring venture firms on Sand Hill Road to help its startups at an inflection point — they've figured out a product that the market wants and now need to scale it, said Ajay Vashee, a general partner at IVP.

"Kevin was the go-to-market exec that helped to make that happen for us," said Vashee, who worked with Egan at Dropbox as chief financial officer.

Salesforce to Slack

Egan has worked in the trenches of some of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies of the past 25 years. He spent a decade at Salesforce in sales and operations before Dropbox brought him on in 2012.

Dropbox was the king of cloud storage, with 100 million users, but it had yet to push into the business market. Egan won over big clients such as Under Armour and NBCUniversal, helping establish the cash flow Dropbox needed to go public. He left in 2016 amid a flurry of executive departures.

Egan spent the past 3 ½ years at Atlassian, the $63 billion maker of collaboration software like Jira and Trello. That company exploded during the pandemic because of the rapid adoption of cloud services, though growth slowed as software sales cycles broadly became longer and more expensive in a weak economy. Egan said he was able to control churn by getting "closer to the customer" and helping them realize the financial return on their investment.

Following years of softening software spending, the outlook is brightening, Vashee said. Startups such as Jasper, which develops workflow tools for marketing teams, and Superhuman, an email app that drafts replies and summarizes emails, are seeing traction selling into the business market, said Vashee, who's invested in both.

Enterprises are investing in AI tools as they recognize the long-term efficiencies and competitive advantages that software can provide. Recent leaps in the field and the shrinking cost of computing have also amplified their interest.

"What a lot of those companies have realized, and what the broader ecosystem has come to terms with, is that the real opportunity is in the more focused enterprise applications of AI," Vashee said. That has forced some companies to evolve their sales strategy, a task that's squarely in Egan's wheelhouse.

In his new role, Egan will help source and close new investments and work with portfolio companies to strategize how to scale faster and better. He adds to the firm's bench of former operators in venture partner roles, including Tamar Yehoshua, who is also a product leader at the buzzy enterprise search startup Glean.

In addition to Egan, IVP has poached Zeya Young from Andreessen Horowitz and Miloni Madan Presler from Summit Partners, the firm told Business Insider exclusively. Yang focuses on AI, enterprise software, and healthcare companies, while Madan Presler invests in enterprise software and infrastructure companies. The firm is also hiring a partner in its London office.