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M&A, Venture Capital, and Private Equity: A Thriving Investment Climate
Ram Shriram, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, migrated
to California and ended up in Silicon Valley working as a senior sales executive
for Netscape from 1994–98. He invested in and ran an Internet startup, Junglee (Hindi
for “wild” or “ill-mannered”), that developed advanced virtual database technology enabling
online comparison shopping and was acquired by Amazon.com for an estimated $186 million.
His ground floor investment in Google—ultimately leading to the acquisition of 3.4 million
shares—earned him a place on Google’s board and made him a billionaire. Today, Shriram’s
Sand Hill Road investment firm, Sherpalo Ventures, has a portfolio that includes Campbellbased
customer lifecycle management IT services and BPO firm 24/7 Customer, India online
classified advertising site Naukri.com, online gift merchandiser Zazzle, travel portal Cleartrip,
India mapping portal MapMyIndia, web entertainment portal Mevio, online financial planning
site Mint.com, and Southern California frozen dessert chain Pinkberry, among other ventures.
Up Next: Animation?
Los Angeles-born Sandeep Sood earned an undergraduate degree
from Berkeley, and built upon his experience working for Peoplesoft
to start software development company Monsoon focusing on producing
high quality software offshore. Bay Area clients include Wells
Fargo, Cisco, and HP. (Monsoon currently fields a team of 80 engineers
for HP in India, including 15 in Chandigarh producing touchscreen
applications.)
For several years Sood also produced a comic strip, called
Badmash, that made fun of Indian culture and the oddities of growing
up Indian in America. In 2005, with support from the Palo Alto
venture firm Velocity, the strip morphed to become Doubtsourcing,
a television show poking fun at the peculiarities of global work, with
the setting mainly in India. Three episodes have been produced so
far, with ten more planned by the summer of 2009. To develop the
show and future products, Sood runs an animation studio in Pune
with an initial team of 20 animators.
He notes that there’s a shortage of experienced animators in India,
and he has needed to send his people to the U.S. for training. Lots
of mid-level people are doing contract work (for example, DVD
work for Warner Bros.), he says, but India isn’t generating its own
intellectual property yet. Sood thinks his studio may be the first.
But India’s film industry is large and it’s IT capacity impressive, so
it may be only a matter of time before India also emerges as a
player in digital entertainment. India’s two largest contract animation
studios are Toon and Prana, which is funded by Ram Shriram,
through Sherpalo, his venture firm.
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