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Power to the Team

There are eleven players in a cricket team — a sport my father taught me in my early school years and I played all through college in India. Each player has a role on the team and has to play their role well in order for the entire team to win. An important life lesson!

The joy of a team win is addictive.

The team-based experiences of my youth shaped my view of everything I’ve done in my adult life, from being a member of the early team at Infosys, to being an investor in team-oriented startups.

With the team at CRV hiking the lava fields in Iceland.
With Kong cofounder Aghi Marietti. Aghi is in the driver’s seat, where he belongs.

We met Kong founders Aghi Marietti and Marco Palladino when they had just settled in San Francisco from Italy.

They had a huge poster of the Ford Model T assembly line in their apartment and they drew parallels between that assembly process and the process of building software using APIs.

Aghi and Marco wanted to help web, mobile and IoT developers build, secure and operate cloud-native applications.

Their solution: Kong, a full-stack platform that connects and orchestrates APIs and microservices across hybrid, multi-cloud environments.

We believed in their vision and CRV invested in December 2013.

Kong is now the world’s most popular open source gateway and at the core of a growing number of the world’s most powerful digital businesses.

Abhinav, Ankit and Abhijit founded Postman to provide software engineers a collaboration hub for building, testing and deploying APIs and microservices.

We first met Postman founder Abhinav Asthana in 2015 when he was just starting up. We stayed in touch over the next few years — talking over dim sum at Yank Sing in San Francisco and whiteboarding at his office.

Finally, in 2019, CRV led the Series B round.

Today, Postman is being used by tens of millions of developers all over the world.

I met Zendesk founders Mikkel, Alex and Morten in late 2008 in Alex's loft in Copenhagen. I was impressed by their focus on building a beautifully simple service. CRV invested a few months later.

I learned about Zendesk after several CRV companies were using it as their support platform to help them improve their customer relationships; I saw universal love for it. CRV was Zendesk's first institutional investor.

The iconic SaaS company went public in 2014.

Today the company has more than 150k paying customer accounts and continues to build beautifully simple software.

I was born in Mumbai, one of India’s biggest cities, and raised in India’s biggest jungles.

My father was a forest officer and I spent many summers with him, deep in the jungle.

I have inherited his love for nature conservation.

My father was a good teacher. Here he is (left) in front of a forest rest house.

My parents on their honeymoon in the jungle, at Jog waterfall on the Sharavati river. It’s the second highest waterfall in India.
It was the best childhood a young person could dream of: being with animals and birds in my formative years and learning from the best.