After previous stops at VMware, Big Switch Networks, and Cisco, as well attending the executive business program at Stanford University this past summer, Howie Xu has joined venture capital firm Greylock Partners as executive in residence.

Greylock’s Jerry Chen threw out the welcome mat for Xu in a company blog post on Thursday. Chen and Xu first met each other in 2004 when Chen worked for VMware’s product team while Xu was on the engineering team.

At VMware, Xu ran the company’s network product portfolio for a decade. He also helped co-invent the network virtualization technology that is the foundation of today’s SDN/NFV industry, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Xu left VMware four years ago to join Big Switch as its vice president of engineering. Prior to his summer at Stanford and joining Greylock, he spent two years at Cisco where he managed the Cloud Networking and Services Group (CNSG). While at Cisco, Xu was in charge of a wide range of products from inter-cloud fabric to network virtualization.

Chen wrote that Xu will consult on Greylock’s portfolio companies and “work with our partners to explore new opportunities to start a new company in the enterprise space.”