Team

Salil Deshpande

  • Managing Director
  • Bay Area

Salil focuses on early-stage infrastructure software and open source. Salil was on the Forbes Midas List of top 100 venture capitalists in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and on the CB Insights list of The 100 Top Venture Capitalists every year since its inception in 2015.

Over the last 10 years Salil has invested more than $200M into over 40 companies including MuleSoft, Lending Club, Buddy Media, SpringSource, Redis Labs, ZeroTurnaround, DynaTrace, Jambool, Dropcam, Tealium, Lightbend, Hazelcast, Groovy & Grails, Sonatype, Frame and Vaxart.

Mildly amusing things written by and about Salil: NYSE, fixing open source licensing, fear the Amazon juggernaut, the great Bitcoin divide, let’s define container-native, hello superfast in-memory databases, open source investor, jump to Bain Capital Ventures, floorboard theory, holy grail of web scale, betting on recurring revenue, JavaEE, no adjectives please, Forbes Midas List, startup founder salaries, fixing Marc Andreessen’s bugs, becoming an entrepreneur again, middleware, Spring and Grails, Bitcoin commodity not currency, Snoop, Zuck and Sal like Philz, 2015 review of predictions, who were the first 25 angels on AngelList.

Salil started his career as an engineer at Sun Microsystems focused on CORBA and Java middleware. He was founder and CEO of Customware, a CORBA middleware company (acquired by Visigenic Borland, now part of Micro Focus), co-founder and CEO of The Middleware Company, a Java middleware company (acquired by Precise Software, now part of Veritas), and of TheServerSide.com network of developer media sites (acquired by TechTarget).  Salil received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where he later taught summer courses on software engineering.

 

Experience

  • Cornell 4 years
  • Stanford 2 years
  • Sun Microsystems 2 years
  • Borland 3 years
  • TheServerSide.com 3 years
  • Veritas 2 years
  • Bay Partners 7 years
  • Bain Capital Ventures 5 years

Portfolio Companies

Personal Interests

  • Code

  • Philz

  • 80's Music

  • Peace is every step

  • Satire

  • Heinlein

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