Aneel Bhusri of Greylock Partners tops the list of desis.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Eleven Indian American venture capitalists have made it onto the annual Forbes magazine Midas List, which ranks the top 100 investors in the technology start-up sector.
Named Midas after the legendary king who turned into gold everything he touched, the list ranked Aneel Bhusri as the most successful desi venture capitalist in the US. The 48 year-old is a partner at Greylock Partners, and is worth around $1.3 billion. His most notable venture is Workday, a cloud-based management program designed for large-scale businesses to keep track of their human and financial resources more effectively, for which Bhusri serves as the chairman and co-CEO.
Deven Parekh landed at #22, a New York-based managing director at Insight Venture Partners. Parekh is best known for being one of the initial investors behind Twitter back in 2009, and scored big when the company went public in 2013. Parekh was also one of the key people behind the Yahoo! purchase of Tumblr, and was one of the principal backers of BuddyMedia, which was bought by Salesforce in 2012 for a sum of $785 million.
Number 27 on the list is Promod Haque, a senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners in Palo Alto, California. His largest venture to-date is FireEye, Inc, which is a global network security company that has an entire product line dedicated to fighting cyber-invasion and the theft of private information. Founded in 2004, the company is now publically traded, and raised more than $50 million more in venture funding last year from investment banks like Sequoia Capital and Goldman Sachs.
The rest of the Indian American names on the Midas List are as follows (ranking – name – title, firm – most notable ventures):
- #30 – Navin Chaddha – managing director, Mayfield Fund – Qunar Cayman Islands
- #37 – Neeraj Agrawal – general partner, Battery Ventures – Wayfair
- #41 – Sameer Gandhi – partner, Accel Partners – Dropbox
- #55 – Asheem Chandna – partner, Greylock Partners – Palo Alto Networks
- #57 – Venky Ganesan – managing director, Menlo Ventures – Palo Alto Networks
- #63 – Vinod Khosla – partner, Khosla Ventures – Square, Contrail, Beceem Communications.
- #67 – Salil Deshpande – managing director, Bain Capital Ventures – Buddy Media
- #86 – Gaurav Garg – founding partner, Wing Venture Partners – FireEye, Inc.
The list was topped by Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz, whose highest-profile venture is WhatsApp. Facebook acquired the mobile communication company earlier this year in a landmark deal worth $19 billion.