Team

Salil Deshpande

  • Managing Director
  • Bay Area

Salil focuses on early-stage infrastructure software, open source, and crypto. Salil has been named to the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 venture capitalists in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018; and to the CB Insights list of 100 Top venture capitalists in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Over the last 13 years Salil has invested more than $350M into over 52 companies, early, including MuleSoft, Lending Club, Buddy Media, SpringSource, Redis Labs, SysDig, DynaTrace, Basis, Compound, Jambool, Dropcam, Tealium, Lightbend, Hazelcast, Groovy & Grails, Gradle, Sonatype, Frame, DataStax, Zeroturnaround, and Philz Coffee.

Mildly amusing things written by and about Salil: measuring venture performance (from NYSE), when central bankers make mistakes, money markets for cryptoassets, how Nutanix acquired Frame, fixing open source licensing, fear the Amazon juggernaut, the great Bitcoin divide, let’s define container-native, DRAM is the new disk, 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, accumulate Bitcoin in 2013, Snoop, Zuck and Sal like Philz, 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 6 years

Portfolio Companies

Personal Interests

  • Code

  • Philz

  • 80's Music

  • Peace is every step

  • Satire

  • Heinlein

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