Salil Deshpande

Interest
Seed, infrastructure software, open source, apps over social graphs

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

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).

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
  
• Bay's AppFactory, specialization of the Seed Program, which invests $25K-$250K in applications atop the Facebook platform

Salil has 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.

Salil has led Bay's investments in DynaTrace (continuous performance management for mission-critical Java and .NET applications), Buddy Media (Facebook apps as ad units), SpringSource (open source), G2One (open source; acquired by SpringSource), LendingClub.com (peer to peer marketplace for loans), Jambool (Facebook app currency), Finestrella (unsecured credit to unbanked Mexican households), Cake Financial (social network and analytics for stock market investors), Marketocracy (wisdom of crowds applied to money management), SocialPicks (performance tracking of investors, bloggers, and pundits), Triggit (aggregating, optimizing ad & affiliate networks), Teach the People (Facebook apps), FantasyBook (on-Facebook fantasy sports apps; acquired by Citizen Sports), and Vaxart (flu vaccines).

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

Contact


Assistant
Eula Takahashi

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