New Beginnings: Garuda Ventures

A personal narrative of my journey to co-founding a new venture firm

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

When my wife and I and our then 2-year old daughter (our son wouldn’t come along until 2014) moved to the Bay Area in January of 2013, I wasn’t sure how long we would be here or what my path would be. All I knew was that after practicing in traditional corporate roles in New York and DC as a healthcare strategy consultant, junior corporate lawyer working on M&A deals, and as a technology equity research analyst, I knew I was missing something and that nothing I had worked on yet had me excited to get up in the morning and get after it.

The “risk on” nature of entrepreneurship and venture capital was not pre-ordained for me. I grew up with a classical immigrant family story - my father is a physician and my parents anticipated a traditional career trajectory for me and my two brothers. We felt and still feel the obligations that all first-generation Americans feel: to deliver on the implicit promise when a family starts a new life here of thriving professionally, personally, and financially, and to achieve big things befitting the risk our parents took to come here.

But I didn’t think about startups as a path to achieve that goal, nor did I really know much about them at all, until well into my 20s and early 30s. Once I learned about them - via then-new VC blogs; covering some of these fast-growing companies as an equity analyst; and observing whole industries being created in real-time - and once I recognized the opportunities for unbounded personal growth, economic upside, the feeling of betting on yourself, and the satisfaction of being a builder and being around builders - I was hooked. 

I also happened to meet my co-founder and partner Rishi Taparia around that time, and knew I had met someone special, with high intellectual horsepower, a big heart, hyper-connected and eager to help others, and someone to “bet on”. He was one of the few folks I knew here as I navigated this path, and I remember him whiteboarding with me in his little office at Matrix Partners in Palo Alto in 2012 about different ways I could break into a career in tech while already being in my early 30s. 

So after my spin through the corporate world, my “second act” was getting lucky by getting hired by Okta at the right time and place, just as the business was hitting an inflection point. Frederic Kerrest and the early BD team took a chance on me, a former lawyer and Wall Street analyst who by then had been hustling to find a role in Silicon Valley for over a year. I happily took a pay cut and jumped in with both feet into helping build that business in whatever ways I could be helpful: first helping build the partnership ecosystem particularly around security products; then helping build the M&A and Strategy function from scratch after the IPO in 2017 and culminating with our game-changing acquisition of Auth0; and finally helping launch Okta Ventures. 

All the while, I “learned by osmosis” from talented product, GTM, operations, and C-level leaders over a frenetic 8 years about what it’s like to build a world-class enterprise software business growing at breakneck speed and inventing a new category. I don’t have another startup story to tell as an operator, mainly because Okta was a once-in-a-generation experience, and all of us who helped build it in that era knew it.

While I didn’t think I was going to be a founder even when I moved, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my career around founders, help them build and scale, and partner with them however possible. My work at Okta fulfilled this appetite - I spent more time “outside the building” with startups and founders than inside. I had also written some personal checks, including as a small LP into a “proof of concept” pre-seed fund called Garuda that Rishi and James Richards had launched in 2018. 

I had always had a sense that I would one day become an early-stage startup investor, and that my path would cross with Rishi again. With James’ calling to address the climate crisis in his own way by building another startup Evergrow (our first investment out of the current Garuda fund), and with our own trajectories starting to intersect again, Rishi and I came together in 2021 and decided the time was right to build Garuda into a new full-time seed-stage venture capital fund.

Building upon the early work of that proof-of-concept angel fund, we would build a firm that reflected our values: invest with conviction and ownership at the inception stage, treat founders with the respect they deserve, leverage our deep networks to help founders win across the categories we would focus on, and be as disciplined about capital allocation of our LPs’ capital as the markets were now demanding of founders and CEOs themselves. And we would trust that following this approach would help us attract the best entrepreneurs and co-investors to partner with on our collective journeys to make a dent in the universe.

After an arduous fundraise process – in the midst of a complete reset in the technology sector,  and with the support of a global base of LPs who trusted us and took a chance on us, and a broad and committed network of advisors, co-investors, and mentors to whom we are eternally grateful – Rishi and I got to work doing just that. And so, with our recent announcement of Garuda Ventures’ $31 million debut institutional fund, my 3rd act – and my own entrepreneurial journey – has officially begun. 

Finally - no entrepreneurial journey, indeed nothing of any consequence in life, can be accomplished without the love and support of family and friends. Spouses in particular, are co-founders in every sense of any endeavor like this. I want to specifically thank my wife Aneesha who has been my partner every step of the way, from marrying me with law school student loans, to taking a chance on moving to the West Coast without a job in hand, to now building and launching Garuda. I simply could not have gotten this far in life and now in building this firm without her and our amazing kids Naina and Kabir. Thank you for everything.