Team

Salil Deshpande

  • Senior Advisor
  • Bay Area

Salil focuses on early stage infrastructure software, open source and crypto. Salil was named to the Forbes Midas List of the 100 best-performing venture capitalists in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

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

Mildly amusing things written by and about Salil: lack of leadership in open source, discouraging Amazon’s open source abuse, measuring venture performance (from NYSE), when central bankers make mistakes, money markets for cryptoassets, how Nutanix acquired Frame, security and monitoring are converging, 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, JavaEE, no adjectives please, Forbes Midas List, much more than money, startup founder salaries, fixing Marc Andreessen’s bugs, becoming an entrepreneur again, middleware is alive and well, 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 co-founder and CEO of TheServerSide.com network of developer media sites (acquired by TechTarget).  Salil received a Bachelor in Science in electrical engineering from Cornell University and an Master of Science 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 7 years

Portfolio Companies

Personal Interests

  • Code

  • Philz

  • 80's Music

  • Peace is every step

  • Satire

  • Heinlein

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