Welcoming Bhaskar Ghosh to 8VC
It gives me great pleasure to announce that Bhaskar Ghosh is joining 8VC as a Partner and CTO.
Great VCs are more than mere investors; they are often seasoned leaders who have built companies themselves. In an increasingly competitive technology world, VCs must work more and more closely with portfolio companies to develop superior technology, talent, and operations.
My personal experience with companies in the PayPal ecosystem taught me that a superb engineering culture is indispensable to building a winning business. Palantir owes much of its success to the amazing talent of the first 30–40 technologists who joined the company, as well as to the internal leadership that helped motivate this core group to achieve its ambitious goals and to continue to attract extraordinary people. In my time at 8VC, I have seen this script repeated over and over as companies like Wish, Oculus, Addepar, Illumio and many others have scaled rapidly. Each of these companies attracts, retains and leverages elite talent, and makes the right technology choices to support and grow their businesses. Each relies upon inspiring and experienced leaders who understand how to maintain quality at scale. Bhaskar — or BG as we affectionately call him — belongs to this elite cadre of leaders.
BG is joining 8VC as a partner and resident CTO. Operating from a central vantage point within the 8VC ecosystem will allow Bhaskar to work with dozens of portfolio companies and entrepreneurs. Locating BG at 8VC will give him more leverage to engage on strategy and share his wisdom on both the macro and micro level than he would have as a technology executive at any single company. Before joining 8VC, BG spent two years serving as an advisor for several of our portfolio companies. His ability to work seamlessly across entrepreneurs, leaders and technology themes confirmed for us the value of senior, highly technical leadership in the VC ecosystem. We feel lucky to have access to Bhaskar’s skills at 8VC in all his areas of expertise, especially in team-building, data systems, sciences, and platforms. As my partner Alex Kolicich commented while we were recruiting Bhaskar, “We need BG at 8VC because almost every major scaling challenge in our diverse portfolio ultimately maps to a need or a problem around talent or technology around data.” Enough said.
BG received his PhD in CS from Yale. He has had a distinguished career in Silicon Valley, working for 20+ years in product and technology in diverse domains including enterprise data and web infrastructure, digital advertising, social networks, and consumer fintech. When I first met BG a few years ago, he ran technology at Nerdwallet as VP of Engineering, Operations and Security. In a little over two years at Nerdwallet, he helped scale its engineering team by 7x to over 65 people, while building a strong engineering culture. His team helped drive a 5x increase in customer visits and a 3x+ increase in revenue while helping to craft Nerdwallet into a premier online consumer brand.
Previously, BG was Head of Data Engineering at LinkedIn where he and his team built and ran Linkedin’s entire back-end data infrastructure — enabling the company to expand its member base by 7x and earn billions in revenue. During his tenure he scaled his team by 10x and helped LinkedIn Engineering emerge as a formidable talent and big-data brand. Before LinkedIn, BG led engineering for the pioneering Right Media Display Advertising Exchange — a crown jewel of Yahoo!’s digital advertising business — and built his deep technology chops developing core RDMBS kernels at top enterprise data-platform companies like Oracle and Informix. Like a select few world-class engineering leaders, BG has an enviable track record of inspiring deep IP , open-source projects , and publications from each of his engineering teams.
In my experience, the best engineers and engineering leaders are often multi-talented people who generally could have excelled in other fields, and BG is no exception. BG is one of the most well-rounded leaders I know, with interests ranging from movies and the performing arts to nonprofits in India and the American Deep-South. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that Bhaskar is the drummer for an Indian folk-rock band in Palo Alto (to which I am still hoping to receive an invite), was a projectionist in a film society at Yale, and worked with Mother Teresa in his hometown of Calcutta! I have found BG to be not only an impressive technologist and leader, but a consistent voice of human wisdom. His presence will add depth and diversity to our 8VC leadership team.
“It is an honor and privilege to join an amazing innovator-entrepreneur like Joe and the hugely talented 8VC team in their mission to enable great entrepreneurs to build category-defining businesses. Bringing more technical and operational leadership talent into a VC firm speaks to the forward-facing vision of 8VC. I am humbled by this opportunity, and am excited to embark on future adventures with this incredible team.” — Bhaskar Ghosh
You can find BG on LinkedIn, reach him at bhaskar [at] 8vc.com, and follow him on Twitter @BGMusings.
We are committed to strengthening the growing 8VC community in the coming years. As we have strategically added senior leadership to the firm, we have focused on specializing and bringing in the very best talent with the most important skills to our portfolio and broader community. Bhaskar’s superpowers complement those of the rest of our team. It’s an honor to have him focused full-time on our firm, our portfolio companies and our core mission. BG will help 8VC continue to drive innovation that positively impacts tens of millions of lives, and to fix the world’s major industries.
Joe Lonsdale
General Partner, 8VC
