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Every year, I meet hundreds if not thousands of entrepreneurs, but rarely do I feel compelled to invest in someone just a few minutes after meeting them. It does happen, though. In fact, this unusual situation reflects a fair number of my investments as a VC since 2005 (Aaron Levie @ Box, David Sacks @ Yammer, Gio Colella @ Castlight Health, Eoghan McCabe @ Intercom). So when my ‘blink’ instinct strikes, I take it pretty seriously, as I did when I met Sanjay Beri, Co-Founder & CEO of Netskope. Some of my Founder/CEOs came with a previous reputation (David, Gio & Sanjay) and others were relative newbies to the Valley (Aaron & Eoghan) so the bias doesn’t skew one way or another. It’s more about an entrepreneur possessing a certain “je ne sais quoi.” I look for that intangible combination of vision and the ability to take that vision, to really believe in it and to convince future employees, investors, and customers of it. But, it doesn’t stop there. The entrepreneur must bring that vision to fruition. Sanjay is doing just that.
I briefly met Sanjay Beri in late 2011 at our office when he was the VP/GM of the Access & Security business at Juniper Networks. Sanjay was one of my partner’s classmates at the University of Waterloo. Our paths didn’t cross again until about a year later when I asked Sanjay to help me evaluate a few companies in the SDN space. His position at Juniper gave him a uniquely informed perspective on the topic. Secretly though, I was hoping to re-connect with Sanjay to talk about what he would be up to next. Given his previous streak as an entrepreneur and all of the excitement around all things cloud in the enterprise, I couldn’t imagine him staying at Juniper much longer. Lo and behold, within the first few minutes of our meeting, it came out that Sanjay had left Juniper to start a company. He had already identified a strong team of co-founders, a solid idea and five investment offers from other investors to boot. I was clearly late to the party.
I spent the next 4 weeks trying to convince Sanjay to partner with us. Rather than putting the hard sell on him, I let Sanjay talk to the CEOs of companies I had previously invested in and offered to work alongside him as if I were already his Investor and Board Member. He made full use of this interview process. We had quick conversations about things as tactical as how much stock to offer advisors to conversations as strategic as how we would go about getting to our first five customers and picking the company name. More than anything it was a chance for us to get to know each other’s styles better and determine whether we would be a good fit for a long-term partnership together.
Sanjay chose us and we quickly closed the Series A investment and went to work in October 2012. Sanjay and his co-founders, Ravi, Lebin and Krishna set up shop at the Social+Capital offices in Palo Alto where Netskope was incubated for the first 6 months of its existence. Our turn-key operation at Social+Capital allowed Sanjay and the founding team to focus on what matters most