Why This Founder Partnered With the Same VC Firm on Three Different Companies

When Jim Barnett needed funding for his employee engagement software company, Glint, the question of whom to call was easy to answer. Barnett’s previous startup, an ad tech company called Turn, had taken investment from Palo Alto, California-­based venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners, and Barnett had served as Norwest’s entrepreneur-in-residence.

Norwest invested more than $3 million in Glint as a part of the Redwood City-based firm’s $6.5 million Series A round in 2013, the same year Barnett co-founded it. Jeff Crowe, a Norwest senior managing partner, believed in Glint’s mission to bring employee engagement out of the paper-survey era by creating software that would notify managers of employee feedback in real time. Crowe and Barnett had a strong working relationship from Turn, and it didn’t hurt that Norwest was an early Glint customer, with an end-user’s intimate understanding of the product.

The firm makes both venture capital and growth equity investments in early- to late-stage companies in a variety of sectors, with a focus on consumer, enterprise, and health care businesses. In Glint, Norwest would go on to invest an additional $18 million.

After two years of selling to small companies in Silicon Valley, Barnett and his co-founder, Goutham Kurra, agreed with Crowe and Glint’s board of directors that to scale up, they would need to woo large enterprise clients. The only problem: Barnett and Kurra had never targeted such clients. “We knew what product we wanted to build and knew how to build really good software,” Barnett says. “But we didn’t know how to sell it and market it to enterprise companies.”

Fortunately, Crowe was an enterprise software startup co-founder himself and knew what product features large enterprise companies wanted to see from startups tackling the space. So Norwest helped Glint hire software engineers to build tools like natural language processing to translate employee feedback in real time. The firm also helped recruit chief marketing officer Jim Bell, a veteran marketing executive with experience leading software companies to acquisitions, and Glint board member Sherry Whiteley, the former chief people and places officer at financial software company Intuit.

To boost Glint’s presence in the industry, Norwest helped it expand into content marketing. The company began publishing e-books on employee engagement, creating a “pipeline of sales opportunities,” according to Barnett. In 2015, Glint attracted the interest of United Airlines, which had merged with Continental and was looking to implement a digital employee listening system. At the time, says Barnett, “state-of-the-art” meant sending out employee surveys and getting a PDF of the results months later. Glint offered employers something totally different–a way to “go into the system and slice and dice the data” on employees however they wanted to, says Barnett.

United signed on as a client, helping cement Glint’s reputation as an HR software industry leader. “United Airlines was definitely a game-changing customer,” Barnett says. During the next two years, the number of professionals using Glint’s platform increased 20-fold. In 2018, LinkedIn acquired Glint for $505 million.

“By the time LinkedIn acquired us, we had established employee listening as a best practice,” says Barnett.

Two successful partnerships with Norwest wasn’t enough for Barnett, however. In 2021, he and Kurra reunited to launch Wisq, a social platform for workers that has raised more than $40 million from a group of investors led by Norwest. Crowe feels good about the new venture’s prospects. “Wisq has all these people who used to work with Jim at Glint,” says Crowe. “It’s like getting the band back together–on steroids.”