Satish Dharmaraj

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Satish Dharmaraj
Alma materGovernment College of Technology, Coimbatore
Occupation(s)General Partner of Redpoint Ventures; former CEO of Zimbra
Website redpoint.com

Satish Dharmaraj is an American entrepreneur, speaker, angel investor and venture capitalist, [1] who currently serves as a general partner with Redpoint Ventures. [2] [3] In 2021, he was placed [4] #6 on the Forbes Midas List [5] of top 100 Venture Capital investors. Prior to Redpoint Ventures, Satish Dharmaraj founded Zimbra, which he then sold to Yahoo! for $350 million, in 2007. [6]

Contents

Education and career

Satish Dharmaraj has the Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Computer Science and "an executive management degree from the Harvard Business School." [7] He also holds the Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Government College of Technology, Coimbatore. Dharmaraj "managed the messaging business at Openwave Systems" (in addition to holding positions at Sun Microsystems and OneBox) and consequently, in 2003, [8] [9] [10] became the founder and chief executive officer of Zimbra, [11] which he sold to Yahoo for US$350 million in 2007. [12] According to Dharmaraj, his success at Zimbra was due to pioneering a web browser that focused on email. [13] While at Yahoo, Dharmaraj "helped Yahoo make its email system open to third party applications." [14] After stepping down from Yahoo in 2009, [15] Dharmaraj became a partner for Redpoint Ventures, where he currently serves. [12] Dharmaraj was Redpoint's first entrepreneur partner and PandoDaily reported that "Redpoint’s experience with Dharmaraj went well, spurring the firm’s current addition of Ryan Sarver from Twitter." [16]

Investments and acquisitions

Satish Dharmaraj led investments in Snowflake, [17] Infer, [18] Sonos, [19] Coin, [20] Gogobot, [21] Peel, [22] Pure Storage, [23] MapR, [24] and Big Switch. [25] In 2014, Acompli, which was funded by Dharmaraj's Redpoint Ventures, was acquired by Microsoft and this acquisition is worth over US$200 million. [26] [27] Pulse, which Dharmaraj funded, was bought out by LinkedIn for approximately US$90 million. [28] Satish Dharmaraj was an angel investor for Posterous, which was sold to Twitter in 2012. [29] [30] In the same year, StorSimple, a product of Dharmaraj, was acquired by Microsoft. [31] In 2011, Cloud.com, which was built up by Satish Dharmaraj, was acquired by Citrix Systems. [32] In 2017, Trip.com (formerly Gogobot) was acquired by CTrip. [33] In 2012, Dharmaraj's Redpoint Ventures helped raise US$60 million for Zendesk's initial public offering (IPO). [34]

Works

Articles

Articles written by Dharmaraj include:

Video interviews

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References

  1. ↑ "Satish Dharmaraj on VC in Third Wold Markets - Ask A VC". TechCrunch. 8 December 2011. Retrieved 26 February 2015. In this week's episode, Sarah Lacy talks to Redpoint's Satish Dharmaraj about venture capital investment in developing countries.
  2. ↑ "Entrepreneur-Turned-VC Satish Dharmaraj Speaks!". The Wall Street Journal. 27 April 2009. Retrieved 26 February 2015.
  3. ↑ Lacy, Sarah (14 January 2011). "Ask a VC: Satish Dharmaraj on India, the Beauty of Fragmentation and Farmers Markets (TCTV)". TechCrunch . Retrieved 26 February 2015. This week, Redpoint Ventures' Satish Dharmaraj was our first return guest and we got to a good number of questions including: "How far in future do you see a global company emanating out of Asia?"
  4. ↑ "Satish Dharmaraj". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-04-29.
  5. ↑ "The Midas List 2021". www.forbes.com. Retrieved 2021-04-29.
  6. ↑ Swisher, Kara. "Former Yahoo Exec Satish Dharmraj Talks About His New Role as VC Investor". AllThingsD. Retrieved 26 February 2015.
  7. ↑ Schonfeld, Erick (9 September 2009). "TechCrunch50: Dick Costolo, Satish Dharmaraj, Bradley Horowitz, George Zachary and Lior Zorea join Panel of Experts". TechCrunch . Retrieved 1 March 2015. Satish has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Sciences and an executive management degree from the Harvard Business School.
  8. ↑ Lacy, Sarah (14 January 2011). "Ask a VC: Welcome Back to the Hot Seat, Satish Dharmaraj". TechCrunch . Retrieved 1 March 2015. or those who don't remember, Dharmaraj is a relatively new partner at Redpoint Venture Partners, after selling Zimbra to Yahoo for $350 million and Onebox, which he sold for $850 million.
  9. ↑ Hamm, Steve (5 October 2005). "Open Source innovation - Businessweek". Bloomberg L.P. Retrieved 1 March 2015. The CEO and co-founder is Satish Dharmaraj, formerly of Sun, Openwave, and Onebox.
  10. ↑ Asay, Matt (21 June 2007). "The Open Source CEO: Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra". CNET . Retrieved 1 March 2015. Name, position, and company of executive: Satish Dharmaraj, CEO, Zimbra. Year company was founded and year you joined it: The company was founded by me and my co-founders in December 2003. Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested: We are now past our Series C, having raised money from Benchmark, Redpoint, and Accel. Background prior to current company: Prior to Zimbra, I managed the messaging business at Openwave Systems which, interestingly, had little or no influence on Zimbra's open source initiative.
  11. ↑ Martens, China (17 November 2006). "Three Minutes With Zimbra's Satish Dharmaraj". PC World . Retrieved 1 March 2015. The aim is for Zimbra to step completely out of directly selling the commercial versions of its products so the startup can focus fully on software development and support, according to Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra's ebullient cofounder and chief executive officer.
  12. 1 2 Swisher, Kara (27 April 2009). "Former Yahoo Exec Satish Dharmraj Talks About His New Role as VC Investor". AllThingsD. Retrieved 26 February 2015. An example of that, though, is this video interview I did with serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj, who has been on the ground floor of a number of tech start-ups–such as Zimbra, which sold to Yahoo (YHOO) for $350 million in late 2007–and has now made his first investment as a new VC. It's in virtualization company VMOps, which was founded last year. VMOps, according to its Web site, "develops software that allows companies to launch an elastic computing cloud and offer it as a service to end-users." Dharmaraj left Yahoo early this year. But he decided not to start another company, instead opting to take a spot as a partner at Redpoint Ventures. There, he is focusing on business software, the enterprise arena and infrastructure.
  13. ↑ Macmanus, Richard (16 October 2007). "How Zimbra Went From Web 2.0 Poster Child to $350M Yahoo! Acquisition, in 2 Years!". ReadWrite . Retrieved 1 March 2015. Satish: "While we were brainstorming on ideas - and we cycled through a lot of them - we always kept coming back to: What are the big things that people do on a computer? Well, they search and they web browse and they read email. We started believing that people spend more time on email than search or web browsing, and so we said, 'Man, that's huge.' It seems so evident but that was basically the genesis.
  14. ↑ Eldon, Eric (21 January 2009). "Zimbra founder and investor Satish Dharmaraj leaves Yahoo". VentureBeat . Retrieved 27 February 2015. Satish Dharmaraj, the co-founder of Zimbra and an active angel investor, is leaving Yahoo, Boomtown reports. He's not saying why — I interrupted him in a meeting when I called to ask — but in the last half a year he's already put angel funding into simplified blogging service Posterous as well as open-source web meeting company Dimdim. He and his cofounders sold e-mail software company Zimbra to Yahoo for $350 million some 15 months ago, and he's since helped Yahoo make its email system open to third party applications.
  15. ↑ Kee, Tameka (21 January 2009). "Industry Moves: Zimbra Founder Satish Dharmaraj Bids Adieu To Yahoo". CBS News . Retrieved 1 March 2015. Zimbra founder Satish Dharmaraj will be the latest executive departure for Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), according to Kara Swisher. Dharmaraj joined the company following Yahoo's acquisition of the Zimbra email platform for $350 million in 2007.
  16. ↑ Deamicis, Carmel (1 October 2013). "With its first partner hires in four years, Redpoint attempts to reinvent itself". PandoDaily . Retrieved 1 March 2015. Redpoint's first entrepreneur partner was Satish Dharmaraj, founder of email startup Zimbra, back in 2009. The firm was testing the waters. "When we first brought in Satish as a partner from the outside we realized maybe it was time, that the model was changing" Yang says. "Having people with direct operating experience would be a good glance to people who have grown up in the venture business." Redpoint's experience with Dharmaraj went well, spurring the firm's current addition of Ryan Sarver from Twitter.
  17. ↑ "Snowflake Raises $26M in Funding to Reinvent the Data Warehouse". Snowflake. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  18. ↑ Lawler, Ryan (11 December 2014). "Infer Gets Another $25 Million From Redpoint To Provide Predictive Analytics To Sales Professionals". TechCrunch . Retrieved 27 February 2015. While Singh said Infer received interest from other investors for its Series B, he ultimately decided to stick with Redpoint because Satish Dharmaraj has been a valuable board member. Meanwhile, Redpoint decided to double down because Infer was not just meeting but exceeding its targets. "The company has executed on everything they said they would," Dharmaraj told me. Perhaps more importantly, he says, "people who use the technology tell me they love the product."
  19. ↑ Satish Dharmaraj. "Redpoint's investment in Sonos". Redpoint Ventures . Retrieved 27 February 2015. Today we are proud to be investors in Sonos. This investment marks a moment as investors that is so satisfying – when we get to invest in a product that we have enjoyed for many years. While doing the investment, we took an inventory of the Sonos equipment that the Redpoint partners owned.
  20. ↑ Crook, Jordan (5 March 2014). "Coin Demoes The Tech That Scored A $15.5M Round Led By Red Point". TechCrunch . Retrieved 27 February 2015. Kanishk Parashar, Coin co-CEO and co-founder, has taken the stage at Disrupt NY to show off how the Coin actually works. He also confirmed to TechCrunch that our previous report on a $15.5 million Series A round led by Redpoint and Spark has, in fact, closed.
  21. ↑ Kincaid, Jason (3 November 2011). "With Growth Surging, Gogobot Raises $15 Million For Social Travel". TechCrunch . Retrieved 27 February 2015. Redpoint General Partner Satish Dharmaraj will be joining Gogobot's board. This brings Gogobot's total funding to $19 million, after a $4 million Series A in June 2010.
  22. ↑ "Peel Turns iPhones, iPads Into All-Knowing, Universal Super TV Remotes". Fast Company. 22 June 2011. Retrieved 27 February 2015. Still, the company has raised just over $24 million in VC funding, which speaks to Peel's promise as a game-changing — and potentially creepy — ad platform. Because the app knows which channels its users are surfing, "it could deliver pretty amazing demographics," says Dharmaraj. "Not just 'someone is watching TV,' but 'a 24-year-old male living in Saratoga is watching Lost.' " To that end, Dharmaraj envisions a future where Peel could tell certain viewers, midbroadcast, what a character is wearing on-screen, and where to buy it.
  23. ↑ Barbierri, Cody (13 June 2011). "Pure Storage secures $28M more for enterprise flash storage". VentureBeat . Retrieved 27 February 2015. In addition, a host of investors are mentioned, including Aneel Bhusri (Greylock), Satish Dharmaraj (Redpoint Ventures), Mark Leslie (former Veritas CEO) and Mike Speiser (Sutter Hill Ventures). The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, has raised close to $53 million in total funding.
  24. ↑ Barbierri, Cody (13 June 2011). "MapR No Longer the New Kid on the Block, Raises $20M". SiliconANGLE. Retrieved 27 February 2015. MapR is clearly the technology leader in the hottest enterprise market space today and our investment reflects our excitement about MapR," said Satish Dharmaraj, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures.
  25. ↑ "Big Switch Networks Lands $25M for Network Virtualization". Red Herring. 6 November 2012. Retrieved 27 February 2015. "The Redpoint team has been looking at data center architectures for a good while now – and we've been particularly focused on the open opportunity to address the limitations of networking architecture," said Satish Dharmaraj, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures. "Big Switch's open ecosystem approach and its brilliant team have created a breakthrough disruption at the right moment – and we're very proud to participate in supporting their vision."
  26. ↑ Siluk, Shirley (1 December 2014). "Microsoft Acquires Mobile E-Mail App Startup Acompli". CIO Today. Retrieved 27 February 2015. As part of its ongoing focus on "mobile Relevant Products/Services first," Microsoft has announced that it has acquired the mobile e-mail app startup Acompli. The acquisition is reportedly worth $200 million in cash. Based in San Francisco, the 18-month-old Acompli closed a $7.3 million round of Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures this past February. Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj called Microsoft's acquisition of Acompli "bittersweet," and added that his firm was "thankful for the amazing ROI Relevant Products/Services that they delivered us." He said it was a "no-brainer for us to fund" the company, started by Soltero along with Kevin Henrikson and J.J. Zhuang.
  27. ↑ Perez, Sarah (1 December 2014). "Microsoft Buys Email App Acompli For $200M, Will Still Support Gmail And Other Competitors". TechCrunch . Retrieved 1 March 2015. Satish Dharmaraj of Repoint writes today that it was a "no-brainer" to fund the team behind Acompli, which includes CEO Javier Soltero, Kevin Henrikson and J. J Zhuang.
  28. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (11 April 2013). "LinkedIn Acquires Pulse For $90M In Stock And Cash". TechCrunch . Retrieved 27 February 2015. LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash.
  29. ↑ Kharif, Olga (20 April 2010). "Startups Find Room to Run on Crowded Social Web". Bloomberg L.P. Retrieved 1 March 2015. Later this year, Posterous plans to introduce a paid version, which would let businesses create marketing campaigns and place ads on Posterous-hosted Web sites, according to co-founder Sachin Agarwal. Satish Dharmaraj, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, which invests in Posterous, says he could "easily imagine a business paying $50,000 to $100,000 to run a campaign."
  30. ↑ Loeb, Steven (12 March 2012). "Twitter buys Posterous for more sharing expertise". VatorNews. Retrieved 27 February 2015. Twitter has a long history of gobbling up start-ups, and today it swallowed yet another one. This time it's blogging and sharing platform Posterous. San Francisco based Posterous raised $10.14 million in three rounds of fundraising since launching in 2008. In 2009 it received $750,000 from angels, such as Satish Dharmaraj, founder of Zimbra and Eric Hahn, CTO of Netscape.
  31. ↑ "Microsoft Reaches Agreement to Acquire StorSimple". Microsoft. 16 October 2012. Retrieved 27 February 2015. Microsoft Corp. and StorSimple Inc. today announced that Microsoft has reached a definitive agreement to acquire StorSimple, a leader in Cloud-integrated Storage (CiS) solutions.
  32. ↑ "Satish Dharmaraj on Citrix's Acquisition of Cloud.Com". The Huffington Post . 2011. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  33. ↑ "Ctrip Buys Trip.com for Skyscanner to Enhance Local Recommendations". Skift. 2017-11-01. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  34. ↑ Rao, Leena (12 September 2012). "Preparing For An IPO, Online Customer Service Platform Zendesk Raises $60M From Redpoint, Goldman Sachs And Others". TechCrunch . Retrieved 27 February 2015. Online customer service company Zendesk has raised $60 million in new financing led by Redpoint Ventures with participation by Index Ventures, GGV Capital, Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners.
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