Salil Deshpande

Interest
Seed, Software, Open Source

Salil is a General Partner at Bay, and focuses on areas in which he has operating experience and thus some intuition.

During his years as an irreverent entrepreneur, he often wondered what went on "in those little VC brains." Therefore as a venture investor, he tries to be honest and transparent about what he is trying to accomplish, respects entrepreneurs' time by working hard, doing his homework, and openly discussing the merits of ideas, teams or strategies, not only as a means of active learning, but as a foundation for long term relationships.

In addition to traditional early stage venture investments, Salil is leading Bay's Seed Program, a fast-track process for investing $250K-$750K in bold out-of-the-box capital-efficient ideas, and Bay's AppFactory,a specialization of the Seed Program, which invests in applications and services atop social graphs, such as the Facebook platform.

Salil has led Bay's investments in DynaTrace (continuous performance management for enterprise apps), Buddy Media (Facebook apps as ad units), SpringSource (open source; acquired by VMware), G2One (open source; acquired by SpringSource), LendingClub.com (peer to peer marketplace for loans), Jambool (virtual currencies and payments), Finestrella (unsecured credit to unbanked Mexican households), Cake Financial (social network and analytics for stock market investors; acquired by E*Trade), Marketocracy (wisdom of crowds applied to money management), Financial Content (syndicated financial content), Triggit (real-time bidding across ad exchanges), FantasyBook (on-Facebook fantasy sports apps; acquired by Citizen Sports), and Vaxart (flu vaccines).

Prior to Bay, Salil was founder and CEO of Customware, a CORBA services company (acquired by Visigenic, now part of Borland), co-founder and CEO of The Middleware Company (acquired by Precise, now part of Symantec), and of TheServerSide.com network of social media sites (acquired by TechTarget). Salil has also held technical leadership positions at several technology companies including Sun Microsystems, taught summer courses at Stanford University, and has been an advisor to several internet community businesses.

Education
B.S., Cornell University
M.S., Stanford University

Contact


Assistant
Eula Takahashi

Buddy Media
Cake Financial
DeliveryEdge
DynaTrace
Engine Yard
FantasyBook
FinancialContent
Finestrella
Groovy on Grails (G2One)
Jambool
LendingClub
Marketocracy
SocialPicks
Sonatype
SpringSource
Teach the People
Triggit
Vaxart