Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:47

Hi, this is Siddhartha Ahluwalia, your host at Neon Show and also co-founder of Neon Fund, a fund that invests in best companies coming out of India in enterprise software space, building AI-first companies globally and usually by second-time founders. Today I have a very special guest, Kirthiga Reddy. You know, I’m so amazed to have you, Kirthiga, on our podcast today.

You have been the first employee of Facebook in India, you were the first MD of Facebook India and Southeast Asia and then you went on, to you know become one of the first, I think, first female partner at SoftBank. You were there for three years, led a billion dollars of investment into transformational companies of the world, launched a SPAC, took a company public, and now you’re running your own company, Verix in Virtualness, right? You want to do so much…

Kirthiga Reddy 2:37

It’s been an exciting journey.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 2:39

….in a small lifetime.

Kirthiga Reddy 2:41

Well, I think the best is yet to come, Sid.

So, but no, it’s been an exciting journey and I feel very blessed and grateful for all of the things I’ve been able to do and the people that I get to do it with, including the opportunity to be sitting here and having this conversation with you. It’s been phenomenal to see your journey.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 2:58

Thank you so much.

Kirthiga Reddy 3:01

And…Very indicative to have the name Neon in terms of just what you do.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:06

Thank you so much. You know, I want to start by giving my listeners a flavor of your life. You grew up in Nanded, right?

Your engineering was from Nanded.

Kirthiga Reddy 3:15

My engineering was in Nanded, correct. Yes.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:18

And then you went on to work.

Kirthiga Reddy 3:19

I wonder how many of your listeners know where Nanded is.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:21

But I think it’s near Pune, if I’m not wrong, in Maharashtra.

Kirthiga Reddy 3:28

It’s closer to Aurangabad.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:30

Okay.

Kirthiga Reddy 3:31

And yeah, Aurangabad is the district. But yes, Pune, you can get there by car as well. Yes, but Aurangabad is probably the closest.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:38

Okay.

Kirthiga Reddy 3:39

And it’s known for its Gurudwara as well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:41

And your father worked in a steel plant, right? And he went all over Maharashtra to set up various steel plants. And you have mentioned, you know, I think in your previous interviews, blogs that, you know, you stayed at a place for max three, four years in your life.

Kirthiga Reddy 3:55

I did. My mother thinks that my father had a travel bug in him. And my husband thinks that I’ve inherited that travel bug.

But yes, so grew up, was born in Pune and moved every three years. So Nasik, Nagpur, Tarapur, Mumbai, a few years in the south with Dandeli and Chennai as well. And as they say, those kind of childhoods make for very adaptable adults.

And they make for adults where you’re always looking to make the most of every opportunity. And that childhood has given me a very strong foundation for what I do today Sid.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:40

And just after your engineering, you worked in private sector in India for a few years. And then went on to do your, you know, master’s in the US. It was not a usual choice, I would say. What led you to do that?

Kirthiga Reddy 4:52

Sure. So right after engineering, by the way, I think Nanded was the longest that my family stayed at any one time because it was a full four years. It was not three years.

And I got my, finished my exam, I think the next few weeks we moved. We moved to Nagpur. And my first job there was with Yashavant Kanetkar, the author of the book Let Us C, which is used by a lot of engineering colleges here in India.

And he had a training institute. So I used to help teach. I used to write programs for all of the programs.

If you pick up a Let Us C book, you’ll see the acknowledgement for Kirthiga Venkatraman which is my maiden name for all of the programs that were written in that book. So that was a lot of fun. He also had some antivirus software.

So I keep telling my kids that my first job also included writing new viruses so that we could test whether this antivirus software wrote or not. So that was that journey. I would say Sid that I came to engineering a lot because of the societal norms around in India where there’s a norm that, hey, you can either be a doctor, an engineer, or you’re a failure.

So that, I would say, was my introduction to engineering. But then I fell in love with engineering. I really enjoy looking at a problem statement, seeing how to apply technology, and figure out a solution to it.

So I wanted to pursue that further. I got enamored by the research that was being done in international universities with the United States being up there in that. And so I went to my parents and I said, would love to do my engineering in the US.

To which my father beamed and said, it’ll be a matter of pride for the family. We will figure out how we support you financially. We’ll take a loan.

We’ll send you to the United States. And my mother also beamed and said, very supportive. Just one condition, get married and then do what you want.

And so then started the search for the perfect groom. Well-educated, good family, must be in the United States. And so ours was an arranged marriage.

We got engaged three days after we first saw each other for a chaperone dinner. And now my husband of many decades, and in him I found my soulmate, my companion. And by the way, I often say that for anyone who’s looking for their partner in life, and not that anyone needs a partner, but if they are looking for a partner, the partner that you choose will be the most important career decision that you make.

Not the industry you go to, not the manager that you have. And my husband truly has been phenomenally supportive throughout my journey.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 7:47

What does your husband do?

Kirthiga Reddy 7:48

You know, he’s an engineer as well. And so he’s a tech person who then turned real estate entrepreneur. And now he does a lot of public market investing.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 7:57

So you both have the investing bug in you.

Kirthiga Reddy 8:01

In different capacities, yes. You know, and I often actually think of the spectrum, you know, blockchain, AI startup, and then real estate, right? Those are two different ends.

I’ve done private market investing. He’s done public market investing. So between us, again, dinner conversations and the lunch conversations are always very interesting and cover a wide range of topics.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 8:27

And also you got engaged and then you went to the US for your master’s?

Kirthiga Reddy 8:30

I did my master’s then. And my mother-in-law was very progressive during the whole process where she said, since you’re thinking about the United States, why don’t you apply to Syracuse, which is where my son goes to. So if this all works out, you can be in the same university.

So I applied, was fortunate to get in. And Sid, in almost a full circle moment, I just joined the board of trustees at Syracuse University a few months ago. And so I was there literally a few months ago.

And there are all kinds of flashbacks about coming to the United States for the very first time, being 3000 miles away from family. And it was a very emotional moment to then be on stage and be installed into the board of trustees.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 9:19

And I believe after your stint at MSU, you joined Silicon Graphics?

Kirthiga Reddy 9:24

I did. And Silicon Graphics at that time was what the OpenAI of today is. NVIDIA, OpenAI, call it any one of those.

They came with a magic bus to campus. And oh, my God, they were showing us how they do animation for the Jurassic Park type of movies. They were involved in the Human Genome Project.

So it’s a high-performance computing company. Which it felt like they were in the midst of everything consequential happening in the world, right? So was delighted to join them right out of school.

And I… that particular career move was through a job fair. I moved to the, after Syracuse, moved promptly to the Bay Area, which is, and my husband had moved there just before that. So moved to the Bay Area, went to a job fair.

This was 1995. And when Silicon Graphics made me the offer, I knew that was exactly where I wanted to go. And from there followed six amazing years, seven amazing years of working on the most consequential things in the world.

And rose very quickly to become one of the youngest directors of engineering. I would say, Sid, my first manager shared a formula for success, which plays a key part in my, in how I think about things. Where she said, Kirthiga, focus on the success of your clients, your organization, and your team.

And in that, your success is a byproduct. And I loved that advice. I, by the way, I tell everybody as they turn manager about the impact that they have on young professionals.

You know, I’m sitting here decades later, remembering the advice and telling you that she had an instrumental role in my journey. And that’s the kind of impact that people managers have and have the potential to have. So that drove a lot of what I did.

And it made job descriptions largely irrelevant because I just had to do what I had to do for making my clients successful, my organization team more successful. It gave me the power of using my voice where, you know, there are many times that you think, should I really say something, not say something? How many times do I say something?

But if you know what you want to do, it gives you that foundation and that moral conviction that you have to be vocal. And everybody here, everyone listening, Sid, should know that their voice carries more power than they think is possible. And so they should use it for things that they believe in and causes that they believe in.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:09

And then what led to Stanford? I think you went to Stanford at the age of 32, which is usually.

Kirthiga Reddy 12:14

I was 29, 29 at that time. And so, yes, so I was one of the older members of that class. What led to that?

I, you know, a lot of people ask me, have you planned out your career right from the beginning where you wanted to be an engineer, be… go do an MBA, go be an investor, entrepreneur? And sometimes I say, of course, it was all planned.

And I remember, you know, the first time I was listed in one of the Fortune most powerful women lists and came back and we had our usual, this was at Facebook. And we have our usual Friday Q&A session, which is a tradition across all Facebook offices. And someone asked me that question.

He said, did you know, did you have all of your career path charted to move to this moment? And I looked at her, and I said, yes, of course. And by the way, if anyone believed even a fraction of that answer, you will believe anything, because none of that was planned.

I did not know growing up that I would want to come do my master’s in the United States. When I did my engineering, I did not know that I would want to go get an MBA. And certainly, Mark wasn’t even born at that point, so I certainly did not know that I would want to go to Facebook.

So what led to it? What led to it was, as a director of engineering, I was beginning to make a lot of business decisions. What projects do you invest in? How do you staff? How do you prioritize? And I really started enjoying that side of my work. And I wanted to hone my business skills further. And it was an agonizing decision. It was not easy. I was doing really well in my career. As I mentioned, I was one of the youngest directors of engineering.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 14:05

A director of engineering at 29 is amazing.

Kirthiga Reddy 14:07

Right. And this was a 9,000 people, $2 billion company at that time. So I kept thinking about, do I do this? Do I not do this? Do I do a part-time MBA? Do I do a full-time MBA?

Going back to the partner that you choose being the most important decisions in your life, it was my husband, Dev, who said, Kirthiga, you’re thinking about this so much, it is better to look back and regret having done something versus look back and regret not having done something. And that was an important push and impetus for me to say, I’m going to go do this. And two years in your career of several decades is not going to make a difference.

And I today look back on doing my MBA from Stanford as one of the most important business decisions that I made.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 14:58

Second most important after choosing your partner.

Kirthiga Reddy 15:00

Ah, good one, good one. Yes, no, totally. I would say the third one was moving to India for, and we’ll get there as well.

So I actually only applied to the top five business schools because to me it was about the pace of learning because I was learning a lot. And I felt that it would only make sense if it was these schools. Stanford was the only school that accepted me.

I’m very grateful for that. And it was also my top choice. So there was a perfect fit there.

And that led to two incredible years of learning where we really got to explore a lot of different topics. Business schools in the United States have a great non-disclosure policy where you’re encouraged to take risks. So you actually don’t share grades because they don’t want you to just take safe courses where you can get the maximum marks, but really go explore.

So I did everything from, of course, the more traditional strategy courses, entrepreneurship courses, and I took real estate courses. I took a whole range of courses. I did graduate as an R.J. Miller scholar, top 10% of the class, but beneath it was very strong fundamental learning. I also was pregnant three months into business school.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:26

Your first child?

Kirthiga Reddy 16:26

With my first child, yes. And so she was born a year into business school. I remember, Sid, I was sitting in my class.

I was taking a two-unit summer class and it was the last day of that class we were finishing. I was watching the clock and I was counting my contractions. And I said, okay, the contractions are increasing.

I should probably just go and just get checked up. And we were living on campus. So I went to Stanford Hospital.

Until today, my mom says, will tell everybody, you know, she just went to the hospital herself to go and deliver the baby. Because they said, okay, please get checked in. You’re gonna have your baby today.

So when I tell my professor that, you know, I was counting the clock, I was watching the clock and counting my contractions, he says, I’ve heard of many different reasons why people look at the clock in my class, but counting contractions has to be the first one.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:25

And what after Stanford then? How do you choose which organizations to work with?

Kirthiga Reddy 17:30

Yeah, great question. So graduated a year later. And when I walked the stage, I walked with my daughter for my graduation.

She was one year old and I stitched a graduation gown for her as well, because graduation gowns don’t come in that size. So it was a lot of fun to do that. And that led to my another important career decision, Sid, which is I decided that I really wanted to do product management.

And that was a function that would bring together both my engineering discipline, as well as what I’d learned in terms of business skills. I also wanted to go to a startup. You know, it was the building part in me.

So most people graduate from a school like Stanford, get a title raise, have a pay raise. I decided because I was going to go to product management, to a startup, I went from being a director of engineering to being an individual contributor product manager, taking a 40% pay cut, because that’s what you do when you go to a startup and the payout is in the equity. Wasn’t an easy decision either.

And I remember agonizing moments, thinking about, is this going to look bad on my resume? I was the director of engineering, large budget, large teams. I get an MBA from Stanford, and now I’m…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:56

You are comparing yourself with your peers at Stanford, obviously, right? What are they doing after?

Kirthiga Reddy 19:02

What are they doing after, right? So all learnings of life along the way, and it was really important for me to listen to myself and what was important for me, also have the benefit of having community around you and experts that you can ask question. So, which makes me think about the community that you’re building with your fund and the ability to go ask your hard questions and to get, tell it like it is advice.

I reached out to someone who was a Stanford Business School alum, Jana Rich, who was with Korn Ferry at that time. I asked her, is this going to look bad if they see that I was a director of engineering and after Stanford, I’m going to do this? She said something that will also always stay with me.

There, she said, Kirthiga, if this is a short-term move, it’s not something that you are going to put your heart, soul, spirit into seeing if it can make, if it will work, then don’t do it. But if this is something that you really are passionate about, trying product management, wanting to work for a startup, things will work out and you will grow so fast that it will not matter. And sure enough, went to the startup, rose up very quickly again to being the director of product management.

I often tell the younger generation that if you look at, if today, if you go to my LinkedIn, your eyes will be trained to just see, oh, she was a director of engineering, then she did…she was a director of product management, then she was a general manager at Facebook. So they will only see those peaks.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:48

The final titles.

Kirthiga Reddy 20:49

Right? But right there, like right below there, you will see on my LinkedIn also individual contributor, group product manager, and then director of product management. So life is about taking risks, making bets, following your passion, following your heart. And that is a formula that has paid off for me.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:11

And what after that product management role?

Kirthiga Reddy 21:13

Yeah. So the company was acquired by Motorola.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:17

Okay.

Kirthiga Reddy 21:18

This was good technology. Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark were investors. John Doe, Bruce Dunleavy were on the board.

Acquired by Motorola. And it was a half-a-billion-dollar exit for the company. So a good exit for the company.

And it was actually with Motorola that I had the opportunity to come back to India in 2008. And with Good and Motorola, I used to visit India every quarter because we had teams here. I could see how much was happening.

Think about the 2008, 2009 timeframe. New infrastructure, new airports. There was so much happening in this country.

And every time I landed, I would think, oh my God, the excitement.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:05

I’m missing something.

Kirthiga Reddy 22:07

So when I had the opportunity to raise my hand for a role in India, I rose it really high, interviewed hard for it, was thrilled to have the opportunity to…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:19

And Motorola was the apple of its time.

Kirthiga Reddy 22:22

Totally, totally, right? So 3,000%. So it was, again, a very exciting opportunity, pioneer in its space. And of course, dual careers always is a challenging move, especially when it’s international. We thought we were gonna come for a year and a half.

I came with my two girls first. They were three and five. And my husband got a six-month relocation approved.

And so he came for the next six months. And during that time, we decided that we really loved being back and that we wanted to stay on longer. And that was when I made my list of, okay, if I want to stay on longer, what would I want to be doing?

Where would I want to be? And this was a time that the internet was just picking up. So if I just think about my trajectory, I saw the high-performance computing boom with Silicon Graphics.

I saw the mobile boom with Good technology and Motorola. I was seeing what was happening on the internet side. And I was seeing what’s happening on the social side.

I was finding that Facebook was becoming an integral part of my life because that’s what I used to reconnect with people who I had lost touch with when I went to the United States.

And especially during those six months that I was here and my husband was there, it was also a primary way that we could communicate, that I could keep him posted about my kids and my children too. I remember Sid, once, my younger one, who was three, was riding on a cycle in the house and she crashed into the wall and she had a fracture on her hand.

We were, of course, traumatized and I took her to the hospital. And these kids teach us about resilience more than anybody else. You should… I still visualize her picture where she’s just had a fracture.

She has a big arm cast and she has this big smile on her face. And so immediately I took a picture of that and I put it on Facebook so that my husband sitting there is not thinking, what is she doing with the kids? And I am really taking care of them.

And so there are moments like that where Facebook was such an integral part of keeping me connected to the rest of the world. My mom used to tell me, my mom got on Facebook just to be able to see what’s her daughter up to, where is she? So I made my list of transformative companies that I would want to work for, be with, be part of their journey.

Got an introduction to Sheryl Sandberg through a business school classmate. Met with her, told her, love Facebook, would love to play a role building Facebook in India. We explored a few different roles then.

Wasn’t quite the right role, Facebook did not have an office then at that time. Decided to keep in touch for the right role. And it was almost a year and a half later that Facebook announced its intention to open its office in India.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 25:26

And I think back then, Facebook was not a public company, right?

Kirthiga Reddy 25:29

It wasn’t a public company. And by the way, Orkut was a dominant social media network at that time as well. It was not Facebook.

But I could see what was happening with Facebook across the globe. And that was certainly high in my list of an aspirational company that I would want to be.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 25:45

And there were other powerful internet companies at that point in time. Obviously, Google was much more powerful than Facebook. So how did you choose?

Because with your credentials, you could have gone anywhere.

Kirthiga Reddy 25:58

So the answer is true. And for me, it was the builder in me and that the Facebook opportunity really spoke to. The opportunity to be the first employee for Facebook in India, and to build our presence here and our operations here was something that was really important.

And wait, I’ll tell you one more story. When I was at, I interviewed with Google during its pre-IPO times. And…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:33

It was 2003.

Kirthiga Reddy 26:34

This during my MBA, right? And I walked away thinking, how big can a search engine really be? Okay. Famous…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:44

And you were offered the role?

Kirthiga Reddy 26:46

So I don’t even think I pursued it really hard. I just explored it a little bit.

And I said, how big can a search engine be? One learns from their mistakes. And I could see what was happening with Facebook.

And I could sense all of that same, one loved the product, saw how it was fulfilling a very basic human need to connect and to share. I could see the network effects that were happening. And I could see how quickly they were growing from being what was only a college campus tool to how quickly they were expanding.

So I knew that I didn’t want to do that mistake again. And so there you go. When they announced their intention to open an office, we re-engaged. Brutal interview process, and was humbled to have the opportunity to be the first employee for Facebook in India and the managing director for India and South Asia.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:40

And as you know, Facebook then globally in 2010 would have had like 100 or 200 million users globally?

Kirthiga Reddy 27:47

You know, we were a few hundred million because I remember that we celebrated the 500 million mark and then we celebrated the billion dollar mark while I was there. And of course, since then, it’s now like 3 billion plus people. So it was a time of unprecedented scale.

There was no playbook. My first charter was to build one of their global operations offices, which ties back Sid to what I’m doing now with Virtualness and Verix, because we had to look at, are you a real user? Are you a fake user?

My co-founder at Verix Virtualness did a lot of work on news and media, fake news, not fake news. Trust transparency was a big part of what we worked on when we built global operations. So I did that first and then focused on India revenue and Asia Pacific revenue.

We spent a lot of time visioning and doing vision exercises. And our first vision for the India market was articulated as 100, 100, 100, where we wanted to have 100 million people on the platform, 100 million in revenue and 100 million people that we touched through our community efforts. It was a very cross-functional goal.

Facebook, like most multinational companies, is structured functionally. So whichever function I directly managed, global operations reported into me, things like HR would have reporting through their functional line, same thing on the user growth side. But it was a very cross-functional team and we worked very well together in terms of our goals at a global level, a regional level, as well as a local level.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:35

And what employee number globally were you at Facebook?

Kirthiga Reddy 29:39

We were about 1,000-odd people when I joined. And when I left, which was almost seven years later, they have a stat that you have been here more than X number of employee. And I think by then, there were, I think I was in like maybe like the 2% of people who had been there with a company for that long because by that time, Facebook was hiring 10,000 plus people every single year. So it was a very different landscape.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:13

And you directly reported to Sheryl at Facebook?

Kirthiga Reddy 30:16

I reported into Sheryl’s organization. So I reported into like dually into Dawn and Grady Burnett who reported into Sheryl. So yes, so that was my reporting structure.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:29

And what were the skills and your learnings from that tenure at Facebook?

Kirthiga Reddy 30:33

Yeah, so many, so many Sid. My first one is learned early on that about just the focus on people. Of course, our product was about people, but even about building organizations, it’s about hiring the right people, building the right culture, setting the right vision and business results will come.

And Sid, there are so many times that I have conversations, whether it’s with entrepreneurs or the largest companies, that sometimes these are seen as soft things. And whoever has the time to think about all of this when you’re running a startup and you have so many different things that you’re doing, thinking about cashflow, revenue, who has the time to think about culture is something that I hear a lot. But culture is about how one shows up, how decisions are made, how conflicts are handled.

So these things are happening, whether you like it or not, these things are happening. And there is a culture that is building up whether you like it or not. And so it’s so important to be very intentional about that upfront.

I love how Rajesh Sawhney who calls himself the founder of founders also says, business strategies can change a dime a dozen, but culture is very, very, very difficult to change. So be very mindful of that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 31:59

I remember a very interesting story that you told in one of your interviews that in your initial years, you had your global leaders come in and you were presenting the business projections, business plan, and they stopped you midway and asked, how are we doing on culture?

Kirthiga Reddy 32:15

Totally, totally. And I’d never been asked that question in that order any other organization that I’ve been with, the first thing that they always wanted to know was about business metrics. This was the first time, this was Grady Burnett who was visiting.

Of course, they’re so excited. We want to show him the business metrics of the impact that we were making on global operations. And we did a bunch of prep on that.

And that’s what I started with. And indeed he paused me and he said, I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I would like to know how are you building the right pipeline for people?

What are you doing to build the right culture? And then, of course, business results will come. It was an aha moment for me.

And I decided that I’m going to really spend time understanding the Facebook culture. And in Facebook, it was all about being anchored on its values. Be bold, move fast, build social value, focus on impact.

So these were some of the elements of the culture that I spent a lot of time on. Sid, that led us to lots of work streams, if you may, to make that real. One, we used to have discussions about what does it mean.

Let’s take Be Open as an example. You ask five people what Be Open means to you, you’ll get 10 different answers. It could be about Be Open with information.

It could be about Be Open in how we are having conversations. There are so many flavors of Be Open that it was important one to have a dialogue about what does that really mean. Two, a lot of people challenged me and said, you can’t build a Be Open culture in India, which is so hierarchical.

We took that as a challenge. The first seven hires of Facebook was someone from L&D, which was a learning that came from a lot of our leaders coming from Google and what is it that they thought was important from building a company and an organization. Nitin More was, led L&D for us, was my partner in all of these different efforts.

And we spent a lot of time training people on how is it that you give constructive criticism? How is it that you give small bites of real-time feedback? We used to have sessions called fast-forward or feed-forward sessions where we would get into a room and it would be like speed dating.

You get into a room and you say, okay, this is one thing you did well and these are two things that you could do better. To create the muscle of people having those conversations, we know this, if you improve like by 0.1 every single day, what that adds up to over the course of the year is phenomenal and exponential. And that’s the kind of impact that we wanted to have.

It was very deliberate investment across every one of these aspects. And that investment paid off in spades, Sid.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 35:25

And how many people you directly hired at your tenure at Facebook?

Kirthiga Reddy 35:31

Another very interesting question. I took that focus on people. Grady also said this to me.

He said, Kirthiga, be involved in the hiring decision for as long as you can until you become a real bottleneck. I committed to personally being part of the interview process for the first 100 hires, no matter what their level is. It took a lot if you think of the first 100 hires.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 35:59

And many would-be engineering roles.

Kirthiga Reddy 36:01

Actually you know, this was, we did operations and that was our first charter that we did. But 100 hires means a lot of interviews to get to your 100 hires. But that paid off in spades in terms of building a very cohesive organization and it’s an organization that I still very, very, very closely stay in touch with.

Sid, they’ve all gone to do amazing things. I want to do a Humans of Facebook India series to podcast, to feature people like Shagufta, who was my executive assistant at Facebook, who now runs, is part of the policy team at Netflix, right? Or people like Akshita, who was the first person from Facebook joined in our operations team, was the first person from Facebook, India who applied and got accepted to Stanford Business School, now is doing a PhD at Harvard.

We have people like Abhishek Nag, who was one of our first managers that we hired from ISB, has been a partner at Lightspeed. The most incredible journeys and the most incredible people. As I think, again, coming back to what we’re building at Virtualness Verix, it gives me goosebumps, really, to think about all of those similar stories that are being written and all of the things that we will look back on five, 10 years from now.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37:31

Wow. And now I want to focus on your, let’s say the last part of your journey at Facebook. What made you decide you want to pursue a career after Facebook?

Kirthiga Reddy 37:44

Great question. So, six years at Facebook India. If you remember, when I came to India, we thought we were coming for a year-and-a-half assignment.

And in a blink of an eye, the year and a half became eight years. When my girls were starting high school and middle school, we had this other family-level introspection and decided that if we ever had to go back to the United States, that was the time to go back when the girls were in that high school and middle school phase. It was a very well-planned transition.

I told the company, almost six months ago, we did a deep search for my replacement. And I went back to the United States. I did emerging markets role, took whatever I’d learned from India, worked with markets like South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia.

Still on the Middle East, still on the revenue side. So I worked with some of Facebook’s largest advertisers, like Johnson & Johnson and the like, on how Facebook can be used in their emerging market strategy. Two years in, two things happened as you asked me the question, what made you decide to transition?

One, I started missing the building and the scaling and the growing. As I mentioned, when I joined, we were about 1,000 people. Now Facebook was hiring about 10,000 people a year. So I really started missing that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:25

The builder in you.

Kirthiga Reddy 39:27

So that happened. Two, Sid, in one of the Facebook conferences, they spoke about how one needs augmented reality, virtual reality. And the use case that was given was, in the United States, 95% of your FaceTime with your child is done by the time they finish high school and go to college.

And hence you need augmented reality and virtual reality to continue to keep in touch with your children. My heart stopped at the first part of that statement because I had two more years before my oldest child was going to college. The intensity of my career meant that I felt this gap of, oh, have I really spent the time that I wanted to with her before I finished this 95% of my FaceTime with her?

I kept waking up to the stat. One of the algorithms that I’ve heard or the intuition that I’ve learned about myself is when I wake up to a thought more often than not. Everyone has fleeting thoughts about, are we going to do this?

Are we going to do that? But if there’s a consistent theme that keeps coming up, in which in this case, there were two consistent themes that were coming up. One was, I really want to get back into that early stage of building.

And two is, oh my God, I have one day less with my child and one day less with my child. I decided that I was going to first take an all-life, no-work, three-month break. My HR partners, God bless them because they were looking out for me, of course, said, you can’t do that.

First figure out where you want to go and then take your break. That is conventional wisdom. I really just wanted to take some time off after the intensity that was Facebook, give myself the chance to think and truly just spend time with my family in ways that I had not had an opportunity to forever.

I told my HR partner and said that I don’t think I’m missing out on my career high. And even if I did, I would much rather look back on that than look back and regret not having spent time with my family. To which he said, fair enough.

If you’re prepared for those consequences, go do it. And sure enough, I did not lose my career high and have had many amazing experiences and my best is yet to come. But during those three months Sid, by the way, one was my HR.

The person who was the most concerned about this was my mother. She said, what are you going to do? You have been so busy.

What are you going to do taking time off? I said, Mom, I’m going to do the things, the day-to-day things, dropping kids to school, making a nice meal, things that I have not had the chance to do. And she kept asking me, she said, no, no, no.

You’re going to drop them at 7 a.m. And you only pick them up at 3 p.m. What are you going to do from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.? She was really concerned. I actually had to write. I have this practice that I picked up at Facebook about visualizing a big, bold vision.

So every year for the last many, many years, I will project, okay, this is December 31st, 2025. What is it that I want to look back on? And research has shown that defining a big, bold vision makes it 47% more likely to come true.

So if you have odds like that, why wouldn’t you do it? So I created a big, bold vision just for that sabbatical period of mine. I said, this is what I want to do, which included things like drop-off, pickup, beating my husband at Scrabble, you know, all things like that.

We are very competitive when it comes to Scrabble, my husband and I. And I also had the opportunity to do things like go to the Everest Base Camp Trek with my older daughter, create memories that we still cherish and remember. The beauty, Sid, of that time, was also that it gave me the time to explore in ways that I could not have.

If you are looking for your next thing while you’re with a very intense career, unless you know exactly what you want to do, you can maybe explore one or two things, given the intensity of what you’re committed to in your full-time role. But this gives you the time to think. It also lets people approach you with new ideas of things that you might find interesting.

In that time, I actually started a seed fund with six other female Facebook executives. It was called F7. And just like you have hashtag angels, this was our equivalent where we were seeing the dearth of women in investing and wanted to…

So we pulled together dollars. It was our own personal dollars. And we were investing like $50,000 checks into amazing, amazing entrepreneurs.

So my foray with investing, which actually started in India, where my first angel investment was a co-investment with Foundation Capital Ashok Garg INDWealth, India. It took that to its next step in having a more formal fund. And it opened up conversations around investing.

While if you had asked me when I left Facebook, what am I going to do next? I would have told you I’m gonna be a CEO or CFO of an early-stage startup. What I ended up doing was, as I explored what I wanted to do next is accepting a role with SoftBank.

Deep Nishar was a managing partner at SoftBank, someone I’d known over the decade, someone I deeply, deeply, deeply respect. So when I had a conversation with him and he told me about investing opportunity with SoftBank, this was 2018. AI is changing the world was the thesis of SoftBank vision fund.

So well, well before today’s AI is the every other word. It was something that I deeply believed in. If I go back in time, in Nanded, for the first time, the university had offered an option to have an artificial intelligence elective.

I rallied together the whole student community and said this is gonna be the next big thing. We got it introduced in the school the first time that it was allowed in the university. Of course, it took a few decades for it to really become mainstream.

But when I saw what SoftBank was doing, their minimum check size was 100 million. They were really creating, shaping companies and industries. I knew this was what I wanted to do.

And that led to another glorious three years of working with the most amazing founders. Deployed almost a billion dollars of new investment had an overall portfolio of over 5 billion, led their first quantum computing investment, their first additive manufacturing investment, their first mental wellness investment, did gaming, Web3, blockchain, enterprise. So it was a glorious, glorious three years of investing in founders, investing in their vision, being a big part, not a big part, a small part of their journey and seeing companies go public and returning dollars to our LPs.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 47:12

And which were the companies that you saw going public during SoftBank time?

Kirthiga Reddy 47:15

Yeah, so one of it was IonQ. This was the first quantum computing investment. And there’s a story in there.

The story is, you know how for the best companies, it’s a hustle to get into their cap table because there’s always more dollars chasing them than there is the capacity to accommodate. And IonQ was one of those. And it was very, very oversubscribed.

Everyone was hustling to get in. It came down to one of my fellow board members from another investment, Collective Health, Alaa Halawa, who was with Mubadala, who was an early investor in IonQ. He really rooted for me with the CEO and the rest of the team and said, I’ve been with her, I’ve seen the kind of value that she adds to companies.

It will really be beneficial for you to have both SoftBank and Kirthiga be part of this investment. And if I step back from that example, Sid, that is so often that these rounds get filled with just the people who are the investors, who they know, and people just co-invest together. And that leads for very little opportunity to bring new managers in, emerging managers in, diverse managers in.

So for everybody who’s listening, when you’re investing, creating a team, I would really urge each one of you to think broadly than the classic tribe that you bring together as for co-investment and see whether there is someone deserving who you might want to make sure that you advocate for. So that, I would say, was one big part of that investment. By the way, all of this was also happening when International Women’s Engineering, Women Engineering Day happened.

I saw a post from IonQ celebrating their women engineers. This was in the heat of the investing process. And I asked Peter, who was a CEO, and I said, so great to see you celebrating.

I asked Peter, so how many women investors are there across the table that you’re having this conversation with? And there was a pause because I don’t think people are conscious about these things. And he said you’re the only woman investor I’m having who is on the other side of the table.

I don’t know how much that part that played. Peter is a phenomenal person, but I was thrilled to have been part of that investment. And to see what they’re doing in shaping where quantum computing is doing. Today it’s a $7 billion valued company.

And there’s so much more to go. In the public market. In the public market, not a paper dollar.

They just are doing some tremendous work with NVIDIA as well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:15

And what valuation you guys came in?

Kirthiga Reddy 50:18

So they went public at $2 billion, and we came in before that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:22

Okay, got it. But an amazing journey.

Kirthiga Reddy 50:26

It’s an amazing journey, yeah. And if I think about also companies that are still private. Eightfold.ai was another investment. They are transforming the talent intelligence space. Another incredible founder in Ashutosh Garg. That was another investment with Ashutosh Garg from Foundation Capital.

And it is, again, a phenomenal journey to see what they’re doing and how they’re changing the world of talent in this environment of AI. Ashutosh Garg is also an investor at Virtualness. In Virtualness.

So that was also very heart-warming when the companies that you have invested in come back and say, oh, I want to write a check.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 51:16

Yeah, many of, I can relate to that. Many of our second time founders are LPs in NEON. Those who have backed.

Kirthiga Reddy 51:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 51:24

But it just shows the belief that they have.

Kirthiga Reddy 51:26

Totally.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 51:27

In the person.

Kirthiga Reddy 51:28

Totally, totally. And congratulations to you on what you’ve built.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 51:31

Thank you so much. And I never knew that being also at SoftBank, kind of when you are cutting 100 to $1 billion checks, you still have to compete for the best investments because you can offer more valuation, more money than anybody else in the round.

Kirthiga Reddy 51:48

Well, well, well, well, well. While I know that that is the general perception that SoftBank comes in and gives more valuation, we were very, very, very valuation conscious. Deep Nishar made sure that he instilled a very good discipline in terms of how we invest.

There were many companies that we did not invest in because we felt that the valuation was not justified. And you and I know entry valuation matters. So, but yes, for the hottest companies, it is you always have to prove yourself and it is a hustle.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 52:30

Got it. And those three years at SoftBank, right? What made you take a decision to move away from SoftBank?

Kirthiga Reddy 52:37

Three years in, worked with the most incredible founders across a range of industries, seen companies marked up, seen companies go public. And Sid, I’ll also acknowledge that there were also companies that did not make it in terms of, you know, one of the investments that I made was in a, I led the first mental wellness investment for SoftBank in a company called Pear Therapeutics. Incredible founder, incredible product.

They solved, they were the first FDA-approved product for addressing opioid use disorder, substance use disorder, chronic insomnia. And this was a prescription digital software. Incredible results in randomized control trial.

Talk about really changing lives. This was a company that was really changing lives. And the founder was an MD, PhD, gave 10 years of his life to this.

What happened was some of the assumptions around how quickly reimbursements rates would come around, combined with the turn in capital markets, which happened in that timeframe, was not favorable for the company. And they had to declare bankruptcy. The assets were sold, the assets still live on.

And so the technology stills live on and they will continue to save lives. And by the way, this is a company that if Kody starts another company tomorrow, I will personally still invest dollars in him, because that’s part of the founder journey. And that’s part of, as a VC, how is it that you need to think about your portfolio.

And of course, in every company that you’re investing in, at least we had the discipline that it wasn’t one of those, yeah, two will survive and the rest don’t. Every company was carefully analyzed and diligence for having very strong returns of its own. But we know that these are how things play out when you’re investing.

So I did all of that. And I came to a point where I actually thought, if you had asked me three years ago, Sid, what do I see myself doing? I would tell you, I’m gonna just continue to invest.

I love working with founders. I love being part of their journeys, their vision, and doing everything that I can, whether it’s from a dollars perspective, whether it is from what I know perspective, or opening up my network and contacts to help these companies grow. I just loved every aspect of that.

But then came along the technology transitions around blockchain, around AI. And then came along this niggling feeling in my mind, which said, oh, I’m missing the building at a like touch and feel building versus investing in founders, which gave me a lot of joy. But I started feeling that.

And when I started waking up more often than not, again, I told SoftBank well in advance that this is something that I’m thinking about. And they had a very strong transition period at the end of which I decided that I’m gonna jump back into building and then came Virtualness analytics.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 56:09

And that’s an amazing journey in a complete circle.

Kirthiga Reddy 56:12

Totally, right? And they say Gen Z is going to see five to seven careers in their lifetime, not jobs, but careers. I am not Gen Z.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 56:27

Yeah, but you saw seven careers in your lifetime.

Kirthiga Reddy 56:30

I’m Gen Z at heart, what can I say?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 56:34

And what I feel today is right, how AI is changing the world. Like if you had asked 20 years ago to people, like even investors, that would you see a NASDAQ dominated by purely internet companies? Nobody would have believed it.

So I firmly believe that 20 years from now, the best thing to summarize it, NASDAQ could be dominated by AI-first companies. And many of our current set of companies wouldn’t become that, it’s hard to eat yourselves as we discussed.

Kirthiga Reddy 57:10

What you’re asking me, Sid reminds me of two things. One, when I joined Silicon Graphics, as we said, it was the NVIDIA and the OpenAI of its times. Almost, call it 15 years later, as you and I know, the company does not exist.

Now, the interest, because they got complacent and they didn’t see the competition coming from Intel. I remember my first all-hands when I joined Silicon Graphics, Sid. The CFO went on stage and said, we have so much money, we don’t know what to do with it.

Everyone got a tag watch. And I missed my timeframe because I was so new and that still hurts. They competed against Silicon Graphics.

Sorry, they competed against Sun Microsystems. Interestingly, the office that I used to sit in for Silicon Graphics is now the Google campus. They competed against Sun Microsystems.

The Sun Microsystems campus is now the Facebook campus. It just tells you, it illustrates the phenomena that you’re just talking about is how quickly things can change. Even today, if you go to the Facebook office, you will see one heck of a big sign that has the Meta logo.

And behind the Meta sign is the original Sun Microsystems sign because Mark wants to have that as a constant reminder about how it is so important to keep in touch with both where the consumer is going as well as where technology is going. Otherwise, any company can end up being the sign behind the next transformative company. And as I think about what we are doing with Verix, Sid, again, that’s the goal is to define the next transformative company.

And our focus is bringing trust back into the equation in this world of AI, is to help. We are an AI-powered blockchain platform where we are answering the question, is this real for skills, certificates, proof of work? It goes back to my days at Facebook India building global operations and thinking about trust, fake users, not fake users.

So we will be one of those transformative AI blockchain companies that is defining the future.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 59:39

Yeah. And I feel that currently the talent that was betting their life on internet in 99, 2000 timeframe became the early members of Google’s, Facebook’s of the world and then started companies, right? They were essentially the initial Google mafia, Facebook mafia, PayPal mafia. They are the ones building ecosystems today. I think same will happen to the folks who are believing in AI right now.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:00:10

Firmly so, very firmly so.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:00:13

And do you see, you know, like you have almost lived Silicon Valley for 20-25 years of your life.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:00:21

Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:00:21

Right. Do you see if Silicon Valley is getting replicated over other parts of the world, like the kind of talent density and capital density and innovation density Silicon Valley has? Is Bangalore closer to that?

Kirthiga Reddy 1:00:34

It’s a great question. And I’ll answer it in two ways. One, India today is so night and day different in terms of its maturity level of entrepreneurship and the pace and the vibrancy of entrepreneurship.

And it is such a joy to see. I remember 2010 being one of the handful of tech entrepreneurs today to fast forward. And we’re not talking about decades and decades.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:01:11

Yeah, we’re talking about one decade.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:01:12

Right. In one decade, seeing entrepreneurs like Mukesh Bansal, who came and spoke at the first Facebook India Day event, we were really small at that time. And now he was with Myntra and to see what he has done, being a repeat founder, doing angel investing and stories like that across the board, seeing Ritesh from Oyo.

I was part of a network, still am part of a network called H2.co, where we were part of this tech entrepreneur ecosystem. And I remember talking to Bhavish and to Ritesh and the ideas were ideas at the back of an envelope, if you may. And if you see how far things have come, it is mind-boggling.

And I also project that if you fast forward a decade from now, the transformation that we’re going to see, including with what AI is going to drive, is going to cause the last 10 years to pale in comparison. And let us not minimize the last 10 years. India had less than 100 million people on the internet when we started Facebook in India and started our operations here.

And now what you have over 800 billion people, that is staggering, staggering. So to think of what that means for the next decade to do of that, I think our boldest, brightest imagination is going to be far surpassed when we have this conversation 10 years from now.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:02:45

Amazing. Thank you so much, Kirthiga. I love this conversation.

I loved your journey and the lessons from it. And you have transformed every five to six years as a person, switched careers, taken newer orbits, uncomfortable orbits. It’s an inspiration to all women and men.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:03:05

Well, no, thank you. I believe, Sid, that my best is yet to come. I sometimes think that I look around and say, okay, what is the biggest, boldest challenge that I have not yet done?

And say, of course, I have to do it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:03:16

Starting a company and building it into an institution.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:03:21

And stats also often play on my mind. One of the stats that I heard was less than single-digit percentage of deep tech founders, people working on AI blockchain are women. So that also led me to this, oh my God, like, if not now, when?

If not me, who? And I’m excited to be in this journey with Verix. It is also a very different world in terms of being a hybrid world.

We have a remote-first company, companies across all five continents. And we are coming together to define the industry standard of verification in this age of AI. And just like how DocuSign changed how signatures are handled, we are changing how verification is being done.

And I’m excited to be part of this journey of defining the next transformative company of its times.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:04:19

And congratulations to you and more and more success to Verix and Virtualness.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:04:23

Thank you. Thank you. Backed by the most amazing investors, many common friends, whether it’s Sanjay, Swami, whether it’s people like Sairee Chahal, Vani Kola, the most amazing investors, both at an individual level, as well as an institutional level backing us.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:04:44

That’s so amazing to see, you know, you are bringing so many folks who believe, you know, in your cause, in you together for such an amazing journey.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:04:57

Excited to be here. And again, grateful for all the things that I get to work on and who I get to do it with. And I also often say that I need Virtualness to be a $10 billion company so that I can do more for all of the causes that I care deeply about, including I have a social impact initiative called Liftery that focuses on working mothers.

And we do lean in circles for working mothers. You know, there is a 39% drop off mid-career for women. If we have that kind of drop-off mid-career, how will we ever get to 50-50 at the top level?

So, excited for all of your listeners to join that cause as well and support all of the women and all of the diversity that you see around you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:05:49

Thank you so much, Kirthiga. It was a wonderful conversation and so grateful to have you on our podcast.

Kirthiga Reddy 1:05:54

No, thank you. And keep putting founders in the spotlight as you do with Neon. And I’m excited to see your journey and all of the founders that you back.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:06:04

Thank you.