Joining Neon as a Partner marks a very meaningful milestone in my life. It feels less like a sharp pivot and more like a natural next step that has been shaped by years of curiosity, exploration, and reflection. From my early days in rural India, to building products in the Silicon Valley, to taking time off from my career to travel the world, each phase of my life has quietly nudged me towards this one.

Now that I am here, I find myself looking back not only to my career moves but also to my values, decisions, and pivotal moments that brought me here. This is my attempt to connect the dots.

Looking back, I realize that a lot of what I have done in my career was shaped by what I witnessed happening around me when I was young. For example, I have vague memories of Ranchi (a small town in eastern India) from the early nineties, when there would be 1 or 2 households with a television in the whole neighborhood.

My generation has gone from seeing that to living in the present day where every person in the household has multiple screens. This technology boom has clearly impacted the lives of many people around me in a very major way.

As one would expect, when it came time to decide my major/profession, similar to millions of others who grew up with me in that era in India, I chose technology, Computer Science to be precise. This Choice took me to Bangalore, the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India, where I attended college and began my career at Novell.

While building enterprise software on the SuSe linux platform in Novell, I developed a keen interest in the Web 2.0 revolution which was only getting started. This resulted in me pursuing a Master’s degree at USC to explore the technologies behind the internet.

After graduation, I joined Akamai Technologies, a company powering nearly 30% of the internet at the time. During my time there, my roles spanned across technical and product related functions eventually exposing me to business strategy. This motivated me to earn an MBA degree from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business which paved the way for a transformative stint at Palo Alto Networks where I led the effort to change the business model for some of their cybersecurity services.

The COVID pandemic led my wife and me to reflect upon the ephemeral nature of life and the importance of acting on our dreams, immediately.

As a result, in 2022 my wife and I embarked on a life-transforming 20-month trip around the world. This journey gave me the opportunity to do a lot of reflection and self discovery.

As I returned from this experience of a lifetime, I was full of energy, and enthusiasm for the next phase of my life.

As I developed some clarity around the concept of calculated risk, I decided to reallocate some of my capital into the VC asset class. At the surface, the median rate of return for the VC asset class doesn’t justify the amount of risk that it involves. In a study by Cambridge Associates for the time period 1981 – 2014, the median IRR for all VC funds was 11.94%1 (per year).

This is even lower than S&P 500’s performance over the same timeline (12.66%1). However, if you look at the top quartile of VC funds (24.89% IRR1) the numbers start looking very lucrative even when you adjust for the amount of risk it involves. The top decile performs at an impressive 30+% IRR.

So, in an effort to find a fund that is likely to end up in the top 25% 5-10 years from now, I did some research to form a thesis. Below I am sharing some of the criteria and trade-offs that I had to think through in doing so.

1. 1. Experienced managers vs Emerging managers – Emerging managers bring a higher element of risk but experienced managers have typically been associated with more conservative returns.
      
   2. Fund-size and investment-stage considerations – Most reports note that smaller VC funds that focus on investing in early-stage startups perform better than larger funds (>$400M). Typically these larger funds end up deploying their capital into late stage startups where the risk is much lower but so are the rewards. Here is a report by invesco that has data around this.
   3. Sector driven – In the recent past, tech driven sectors (AI, Biotech, etc) have performed much better than the broader market. The trick here is to identify a sector that is likely going to be lucrative for the next 5-10 years.
   4. Access to lucrative deals – Every fund has their own way of accessing lucrative startup deals. An investor would need to assess if a fund’s way is promising and scalable.
   5. Right team in place – Who is making the investment decisions and what is their methodology? Investors would need to understand a fund’s decision making process and evaluate whether it resonates with them.

As founders of Neon, Siddhartha and Nansi set the culture of this team. Anyone who has worked with the team will confirm that competence and empathy are 2 distinct values that shine bright in every interaction.

I clearly felt it in my interactions with the team. Slowly those interactions became more and more frequent and soon my role at Neon changed from Potential Investor -> Limited Partner -> Venture Partner -> Partner.

By virtue of being in the cybersecurity industry for most of my career and being in the San Francisco bay area, I have had the privilege of being exposed to a lot of cutting edge technologies as well as product/business strategy at firms that are market leaders in their segments.

This exposure has been instrumental in shaping my interactions with startup founders, particularly in guiding them on building scalable products and crafting effective Go-To-Market strategies.

These are very exciting times in the world of technology (even otherwise). The disruption being caused by AI is nothing short of an earthquake. Once the dust settles, it is clear that there will be some winners. At Neon, we are working hard everyday to ensure we identify startups in this space that have a high probability of winning.

I am excited to be back in the San Francisco bay area, where a lot of this action/disruption is, and I am super excited for being part of Neon’s incredible journey.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates coming soon.