Menlo Park, California, United States
I know what it feels like to start with nothing but a thesis and a whiteboard. I grew up in India, graduated from IIT Delhi, began a PhD at Stanford, and walked away because I couldn’t wait to build. I spent my 20s founding three companies: VXtreme (acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media), iBeam Broadcasting (NASDAQ: IBEM), and Rivio (merged with CPA.com). Being a 3x founder taught me that company building is a marathon, markets are unpredictable, and the only constant is the quality of the people you surround yourself with. When I crossed the table, I brought every one of those lessons with me. Twenty years later, I still operate in founder mode every day. I back founders primarily at inception, before the market believes. Under my leadership, Mayfield is investing $3 billion in AI, focused on the builders creating the future of AI. Most investors define ROI as return on investment. I define it differently: Rise of the Individual. My role is to help people reach levels they never imagined possible. Across my career, I’ve partnered with founders at 60+ companies creating more than $120B in equity value: - 18 IPOs, including Akamai, Lyft, HashiCorp, Poshmark, SolarCity, MakeMyTrip, Persistent Systems, Matrimony.com, and Tejas Networks. - 29 acquisitions, including Securiti.ai (Veeam), Nuvia (Qualcomm), Volterra (F5), Portworx (Pure Storage), CloudGenix (Palo Alto Networks), CloudSimple (Google), Gigya (SAP), StorSimple (Microsoft), and more. I’ve been named to the Forbes Midas List 18 times - including Top 5 rankings in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024 - and recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. AI is the greatest opportunity of our lifetime - for founders, for businesses, for humanity. I love working with people who never stop learning, never stop growing, never stop giving their best. If you’re building the future of AI and put people first - let’s talk.
Inception and early-stage investor
AI-powered data privacy and security