Keval Desai’s Post

Like everyone in VC, we at SHAKTI are also not working in the summer = being lazy is highly underrated. Also, if you got a check from us last week, that was an accident = please send it back, thank you.

It helps to be lucky, repeatedly. This is especially true when one gets to collaborate with exceptional people more than once in the same lifetime. In venture capital, much like any team sport, “repeat business” is the ultimate sign of trust & respect. Even when Founders, VCs & LPs make money together, it’s not a given they will collaborate again because working together for years truly reveals character. Once may be accidental, twice is a conscious decision. Today, we got lucky again because one of my collaborators from Google whom I have admired for 2 decades & always wished to partner again is choosing to do just that. Welcome Jesse Haines to SHAKTI!! After nearly two decades of illustrious leadership at Google, Jesse is joining Elizabeth Harrow and I to help our customers (Founders & LPs) build category leading companies from concept through IPO. Going from zero to billion is a journey that Jesse has traveled many times across Google’s consumer & commercial businesses. Jesse is a unique leader who’s equally comfortable engaging with small teams across engineering & product on “Day 1” as well with large cross-functional teams scaling to thousands with senior stakeholders in business & government. And just as with everything in the VC business, Jesse’s career is a portfolio - spanning from entrepreneur to educator to management consultant and operator. I can’t wait for our community to meet Jesse and experience the joy of collaborating with her and benefit from her portfolio of experiences, just as I have. Thank you Jesse for the repeat business!!

Around 2006, we had a GPS at Google where we said "let's do Search, Ads & Apps on TV" (because the "universally accessible" part of the mission wouldn't be complete without reaching the biggest mass market medium). A variety of things followed over the years from this decision, none of which would have been possible if a few months later a super smart, authentic, friendly (& handsome) guy hadn't walked into a room in Mountain View, straight out of central casting. When I first met the great Mike Steib, I thought "This guy was born a CEO". My second thought was "He knows TV like no one else and he is the only TV guy who can teach us nerds how to reimagine it". Over the next few years, Mike built the best TV tech GTM machine, debated and taught me everything about what TV audiences, publishers and advertisers care about, how they think, how they talk, how they spend money. Eventually Mike took on all of the "Emerging ads" GTM function and the alums (& current members of his team) themselves became leaders/CEOs. Very few outside leaders, especially from traditional media, came into Google and were successful. Mike was one of them. How/why? Because he is super smart, authentic, friendly (& handsome) - he intuitively understands how to blend media and technology for the benefits of users, advertisers and publishers. And above all, he is a fantastic leader who genuinely cares for his team and spends years investing in them and building them up for greater success. The team at TEGNA could not have made a better choice in their incoming CEO = the great, the one & only Mike Steib!!!! Way to go Mike!!! (ps: local TV ads with show targeting is a good idea)

Today is garbage pickup day on our street in SF (don't worry this is not a political post, hang with me, it's going to end great!). Turns out while our household tries diligently to separate the recyclables into the blue bin, we are not perfect (well, I am, but the other 2 in our home, not so much ;) So what happens to the garbage when it shows up at the Recology recycling center and the non-recyclable item ended up in the blue bin which got dumped with thousands of other blue bins into a pile? For years, this thought of committing a "climate fraud" has caused me guilt. Then a couple of years ago, we met the great Rebecca Hu + Areeb Malik! (Thanks to an introduction to Areeb by another great Sameer Shariff who used to hang out with yet another great Salahuddin Choudhary who was on my team at Google - see this is how "luck" works in Silicon Valley but I digress). Sometimes you meet founders and you know instantaneously that while the idea is garbage (pun intended) it's just going to work because these founders are just going to win. That was the case with Areeb & Rebecca. So couple of years later, it turns out that the garbage that gets picked up outside our house in SF and shows up on a conveyor belt at Recology, there is a robot that can separate the recyclables from the non-recyclables. Finally, I can sleep at night, guilt-free. Not only that, the one place where no human wants to compete with a robot doing their job, is sorting garbage. It's goodness all around. Areeb & Rebecca and their team figured out how to reimagine a daily habit for billions of people with new technology and in the process make a dent on making our planet better. Can't find a better deal than that. Fast forward, something AMAZing happened today - you can read about it below. Want to sleep guilt-free at night? Let's all help this awesome team Glacier any way we can = more talent, more customers, more money = we will need all of us to come together behind entrepreneurs like these to save our planet. Way to go Areeb Malik Rebecca Hu & Team Glacier!!! cc SHAKTI

There are a lot of claimants to autonomous logistics, but only one that actually has autonomous trucks on the road (without a human inside).

Friends: If you know of anyone with an interest in a career in robotics, please pass this along ... cc SHAKTI

Can AI help predict cancer treatment outcomes and thus ensure that precious resources can be directed efficiently during R&D to the more promising treatments? This paper in Nature says yes, such a goldmine is possible if new "picks and shovels" such as Betteromics are used.

To my friends in Africa (& IIT's), hope you will take advantage of this opportunity for your exec teams, facilitated by Zindi. cc SHAKTI