Porter stands out for getting involved with founders extremely early—Highspot's CEO recalls meeting with him every two weeks before the company even had a prototype or any funding—and for building his career on hands-on technical and dealmaking experience rather than a typical finance path, having closed 14 deals worth more than $850 million at Microsoft, worked at the satellite startup Teledesic and Craig McCaw's Eagle River Investments, and earned an MIT mechanical engineering degree before his Stanford MBA. That background shows up in his investing focus today, as he concentrates on early-stage, technically deep B2B areas like intelligent SaaS, developer tools, cloud automation, machine learning, and security.