Satish Dharmaraj is a Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. He started his journey in the US as an immigrant with $5k in debt at a trailer park in South Carolina, but is now recognized as one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists.
At Redpoint, he’s invested in companies including: Snowflake ($50bn market cap), Cockroach Labs ($5bn valuation), Duo ($2.35bn acquisition), Pure Storage ($12bn market cap), and Zendesk ($10.2bn acquisition).
Prior to joining Redpoint, Satish was the Founder/CEO of Zimbra. Zimbra was an open source online/offline office suite that was acquired by Yahoo! for $350mn in 2007.
Before Zimbra, he was VP of the Messaging Product Division at Openwave Systems, responsible for the email, unified messaging, voicemail, and instant messaging product lines. Satish managed the engineering and product management teams which had over 200 people and a $45 million budget. While at Openwave, Satish's division deployed 180 million mailboxes worldwide with the largest deployments being 20 million mailboxes at JPhone and KDDI in Japan.
Satish previously was part of the founding team at the unified messaging company Onebox, where he led engineering and network operations, and was instrumental in the sale of Onebox to Phone(.)com for $850 million.
Prior to Onebox, Satish was at Sun Microsystems' JavaSoft Division where he was responsible for the conception, design and implementation of Java Server Pages (JSPs); in addition, he led the team that designed and implemented the Java Servlet API. Satish previously held several positions at IBM and Transarc Corporations.
Letter #116: Satish Dharmaraj (2013)
Today’s letter is a blog post Redpoint Managing Director Satish Dharmaraj wrote detailing what he would do if he started Zimbra (the company he started and sold to Yahoo! for $350mn before joining Redpoint) again. He wrote about the massive opportunity for a smart company to serve the professional market with a real, thoughtful solution for mobile email.
Just a few months later, he began working with Acompli, a team working on that exact challenge. And just another few months later, Microsoft purchased the company for $200M.
In just 20 months, Satish went from blog post to $200M exit.
[Full letter in link in bio]