Greylock Partners

The first thing that hits you about Greylock.com isn't their portfolio of unicorns or their $5 billion AUM—it's the immediate 404 error when you try to load their team bios on mobile Safari. I'm staring at a console full of "Cannot read property 'offsetHeight' of null" errors while their hero video burns through 15MB of bandwidth to show Reid Hoffman talking in slow motion. Their webpack bundle analysis reads like a horror novel: three different versions of React somehow coexisting, unused Lodash functions adding 200KB for a single _.debounce call, and enough polyfills to support Internet Explorer 6. The irony of a firm that funded Facebook serving a website that would make Zuckerberg weep into his hoodie is not lost on me. Also, their custom font loads so late that I experience more FOUT than a MySpace page from 2004.

Diving into their source code feels like archaeological excavation through layers of technical debt. They're running a Gatsby build so bloated it makes WordPress look nimble—their main JavaScript bundle clocks in at 1.2MB uncompressed, mostly because someone decided they needed Framer Motion for a fade-in animation you could achieve with three lines of CSS. The class names suggest multiple developers working in isolation: `.hero-section-wrapper-container-div` sits next to `.HeroComponent__StyledWrapper-sc-1kxzx9d-0`. Their GraphQL queries are fetching entire blog post contents just to display titles, and don't get me started on the fifteen different CSS-in-JS solutions I found in their vendor bundle. I dated a technical co-founder once who built cleaner code during a three-day hackathon bender.

The tracking situation reads like a privacy lawyer's fever dream. I counted 23 third-party scripts loading before the fold, including HubSpot, Segment, Google Analytics (both UA and GA4, naturally), Hotjar, and something called "greylock-internal-analytics.js" that's definitely not GDPR compliant. Their Content Security Policy is so permissive it might as well be "allow *". Meanwhile, their robots.txt blocks half their portfolio pages from Google indexing, which explains why I had to DuckDuckGo my way to find their actual investment thesis. The meta description is literally "Greylock Partners - Venture Capital" like they're optimizing for searches from 2003. Their Open Graph image is a 47KB JPG that looks like someone screenshot their logo in MS Paint and called it a day.

What really gets me is the typography situation that would make Erik Spiekermann file a restraining order. They're loading four font weights of Inter (including the entirely unused 900-weight), but their line-height calculations are so inconsistent I'm wondering if they're using a random number generator. Body copy sits at 1.47 line-height while headers fluctuate between 1.2 and 1.8 with no discernible system. The letter-spacing on their taglines is tighter than my jeans after a Roberta's pizza binge, making "Investing in transformative companies" look like it was kerned by someone with astigmatism. Their responsive breakpoints appear to be based on whatever devices the team had lying around—I found media queries at 1023px, 768px, 767px, and 640px, suggesting they tested on exactly four devices and called it comprehensive.

The most damning detail? Their 404 page returns a 200 status code, and their sitemap.xml hasn't been updated since 2019. For a firm that's funded some of the most technically sophisticated companies on Earth, serving a website that would get rejected from a junior developer bootcamp portfolio feels like performance art. They're literally investing millions in companies solving complex distributed systems problems while their own contact form breaks if you type more than 140 characters. The cognitive dissonance is so severe I'm considering it for my next art installation in Bushwick.