Tim Tully

Tim is a partner at Menlo Ventures focused on early-stage investments that speak to his passion for AI/ML, the new data stack, and the next-generation cloud. He’s committed to helping Menlo double down on the future of the cloud, where things continue to accelerate at a blinding pace. He also advises on early-growth investments considered by Menlo’s Inflection Fund.

Over his career, Tim has partnered with countless individuals who have pushed the technical and creative envelope. A technologist and developer at heart, he has deep technical knowledge and years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience developing and managing teams that will be helpful to many entrepreneurs as they navigate finding their product-market fit and then executing to get there as they grow their companies and teams. Additionally, he spent many years at Splunk in the field helping drive go-to-market execution, providing a unique and rare blend of technical depth, large-scale management experience and sales expertise.

Before joining Menlo, Tim was CTO of Splunk and oversaw the company’s shift from on-prem software to a cloud-first organization. Under Tim’s leadership running both product and engineering as well as IT and security, he massively scaled Splunk’s product, design, IT and engineering teams, tripling its product team from 600 to 1,800 in less than three years. He helped the company more than double its sales revenue from $950M in 2017 to $2.25B in 2020, increasing Splunk’s market cap to nearly $25B in the process. He was also responsible for 10 of Splunk’s acquisitions (SignalFx, Omnition, Phantom Cyber, Victorops, Streamlio, Plumbr, Flowmill, Rigor, Rocana, and SignalSense) and also worked with Splunk’s venture capital arm.

Prior to Splunk, Tim spent over a decade in various technical roles at Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and several startups. At Yahoo!, he rose from a data engineer to Chief Data Architect and worked closely on several important open source projects including the internal systems that led to Hadoop. He went on to lead engineering across Yahoo Media products, including Yahoo.com, Yahoo Finance, Fantasy Sports, Tumblr and more.

As a former developer, operator, architect, and leader of thousands of engineers and projects across both Splunk and Yahoo, Tim’s technical background will resonate with early-stage founders that want an investor who deeply understands their industry. Tim holds an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. from the University of California, Davis. In his spare time, Tim hacks on side projects: enterprise-grade wireless networking in his home, crypto mining Ethereum in his basement, as well as coding recreationally. Most recently he developed a Unity-based first-person shooter inspired by Cyberpunk 2077 for the Splunk engineering teams.