During the pandemic I have been making feeble attempts at getting back to playing the piano again. Took a few online classes to warm up and yesterday, during a lesson, my teacher asked me about past exposure to music (beyond listening), and from there the conversation shifted to why I seem to love playing Chopin so much. Well, how does one articulate that? I didn’t like how imprecise my answers were, so I decided it was time I brush up on my music theory and put this down on paper.

Before I say anything about Chopin, I have to acknowledge…

The Dos and Don’ts of raising investment from Corporate-VCs

I recently ran a twitter poll asking the audience what topic they’d like me to write about and “raising from corpdev/strategics” won out. Lucky for me, I do have a lot to say on this. While I spent most of my career as an product / engg / BD guy, the last few years @Google I worked closely with our M&A team on various investment and M&A deals. Not much has been written about this from a strategic’s POV, so startups default to provocative generalities — e.g. …

6 months later: Return to India after 15yrs in the US

I got a great response from my Return to India: a decision framework. Every week or so, I meet a founder who asks me how my transition back has been, so this article was inevitable. For the uninitiated, I spent 2003–2018 outside of India, primarily in USA (14yrs) and UK (1yr) studying and then working in companies such as AMD (engineering), Google (bizdev), and Andreessen Horowitz (VC) and returned to India July’18 to join Lightspeed India as a Partner. I intend to write a series of “letters” here discussing my experiences moving back.

The big Q 1 of 2: how was it?

Living in India is just. plain. awesome…

A few weeks ago I put up a note on my LinkedIn (see above) about books that can form the building blocks to our understanding of just about everything there is to know in this universe. Essentially, I wanted to understand why are we the way we are and why have our social, political and biological systems evolved into what they are today.

The response was so good that it took me over a month to get this post together with the top 50 of the over 100+ recommendations.

Full list is at the google doc here.

I call it…

It’s been a week since I left Google Cloud to join Andreessen Horowitz to try my hands at being a silicon valley VC. Thank you all for the congratulatory messages! Many have asked about how I made the switch, what decisions I made at Google to grow my career, etc. If that is interesting to you, read on. I’ll lay out a few “ground truths” first before going into some concrete actions that worked for me:

Ground Truths:

1. Career is a long game: before I got into Google, I was jobless for over 8 months, had been rejected by quite a few…

Set of frameworks to help immigrants decide when it is the right time to head home!

My recent post about heading back to India as a venture capitalist after almost 15 years in the US made me realize just how many people in my network have been mulling on this broader topic: moving back to their respective home countries from their current country of residence for various reasons ranging from doing a startup, to joining a big firm, etc.

Returning to India had far too many aspects to consider: family, career path, day to day, salary, lifestyle, and overall happiness. What really helped me decide to make the jump was a set of frameworks I went…