Apple has hired a former venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, Josh Elman, who led early investments in Discord and the forerunner to TikTok, to work on Apple’s App Store.
Elman’s role will focus on app discovery for customers, he said in a statement Monday. He’ll step back from investing and the corporate boards that he serves on, which includes the communications app Discord and the blogging site Medium.
Until last year, Elman was the vice president of product at Robinhood Markets Inc., the wildly popular stock-trading app. His experience identifying and investing in apps that later became hits could help Apple better promote software in its app store, which generated almost $54 billion in revenue for the company in fiscal 2020.
MacDailyNews Note: Here’s Elman’s thread on Twitter regarding his move to Apple:
2/ I’m joining Apple to work on @AppStore and help customers discover the best apps for them.
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) November 30, 2020
4/ As part of this transition, I will be stepping back from some of my active boards and investments. I wanted to say thank you to the founders who welcomed me on these journeys:
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) November 30, 2020
6/ Thank you @ev for the chance to partner on @medium as you work to build the platform for ideas to spread and deepen everyone’s understanding of the world.
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) November 30, 2020
8/ Thank you @benrbn @simasistani @ahawkinson @samjadallah @biz @robinchan @tiktok_us for the chance to partner on your companies during your journeys
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) November 30, 2020
10/ I recently found my college resume. My career objective was “To create great technology that changes people’s lives”. Still at it 🙂
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) November 30, 2020
Hey Josh, maybe you could lend a hand to every system that Apple uses to organize the “tiles” on the iPh home screen, podcasts and of course, the App Store?
Organizing the iPh screen is a jittery mess, podcasts are unusually heavy handed…just please let me go to the app to decide/find. When I go to a library, it’s kind of nice to have a predictable arrangement…instead of another jittery moving target, where Apple’s attempt to organize is anything but.
These issues seem to align with Apple increasingly pushing their own way a consumer is to consume. It’s a lot like Google, some have said, being more of a suggest, vs search engine.