Jacob
Andreou

The Growth Architect

He studied how bodies work before he studied how apps grow. Jacob Andreou's degree in Biomedical Computing from Queen's University was never going to land him in a lab - it gave him the systems-level thinking that would later rewire how Snapchat reached 363 million people. He arrived at Snap in May 2015 as a design engineer, when the company was tiny and scrappy. Eight years later, he left as Senior Vice President of Growth, after growing ad revenue from $3.9 million to over $1 billion per quarter.

Before Snap, Andreou co-founded ThinkAkili, an online retail analytics startup, in 2012. He was in his early twenties, building product from scratch, learning what it meant to sell something nobody had asked for yet. That founding muscle - the willingness to build before there's a playbook - carried into everything he did at Snap. He didn't just run growth teams; he invented the frameworks those teams ran on. The Core-Product-Value growth framework. The international growth playbook. The scaffolding that took Snap from an American curiosity to a global platform with users from Mumbai to Manchester.

Andreou's eight years at Snap weren't linear. He started at the design layer, moved through growth and product leadership, and eventually oversaw product, design, data science, analytics, user research, and sociology teams simultaneously. He launched Spotlight - Snap's answer to TikTok - and he launched My AI, one of the earliest mass-market AI chatbots, powered by ChatGPT and deployed to over 360 million daily active users. That is not a small thing. He deployed a generative AI product to hundreds of millions of people before most companies had shipped a single AI feature.

In March 2023, he became Greylock's ninth general partner. He was 29 years old, one of only two Greylock GPs under thirty. His investment thesis at Greylock focused on consumer tech: social platforms, the creator economy, interactive gaming, and AI products that actually reach people rather than just enterprises. He'd been angel investing in Snap alumni startups - Captions.AI, In Search Of - while still employed at Snap. The instinct was already there. Greylock just gave him the capital and platform to act on it systematically.

His investment range at Greylock ran from $2 million to $20 million, with a sweet spot around $10 million - early enough to matter to a founder, large enough to be a real partner. He was investing in LA from a firm headquartered in Menlo Park, a geographic arbitrage that made him unusually well-positioned to catch the wave of consumer tech building happening in Southern California.

Then Microsoft called. He joined as Chief Vice President of Product and Growth for Microsoft AI, and in March 2026, Satya Nadella elevated him to Executive Vice President of Copilot - reporting directly to the CEO, leading the unified Copilot experience across both consumer and commercial products. The announcement described him as someone who had "accelerated our user-focused AI-first product making and growth framework." That's Satya Nadella's phrasing. It's the kind of line that takes an entire career to earn.

Andreou now oversees design, product, growth, and engineering for one of the most-watched AI products in the world. The Copilot Leadership Team he sits on includes Mustafa Suleyman, Charles Lamanna, Perry Clarke, and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. It is an unusual group - a former AI safety researcher, a low-code pioneer, a LinkedIn chief, and the growth architect who grew up designing Snapchat's first ad units. The person who figured out how to get 363 million people to open an app every day is now figuring out how to get a billion people to trust an AI assistant.

Outside of work: he proposed to British TV presenter and actress Carly Steel in December 2019, in front of the Eiffel Tower. They married in June 2020. It's the kind of personal detail that doesn't change anything about his career, and somehow explains it anyway - he is someone who goes to Paris when he wants to make a point.