Array Ventures Enterprise Event

We at Array Ventures are really excited about our enterprise event next week on June 4th. We have some awesome panels and great pitches from some of our companies.

The 2 panels are as follows:

Panel 1: State of Enterprise Investing:

Partners of top VC firms such as Trinity Ventures, Vista Equity Partners, Sapphire Ventures tell us what they look for in companies while investing at Series A to Growth Stage companies.

Ajay Chopra, General Partner, Trinity Ventures

Ajay Chopra is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures. A successful entrepreneur-turned-investor, he focuses on early stage investments in consumer and business applications and services. He has invested in numerous prominent companies, such as FitBit (FIT) TubeMogul (TUBE, acquired by Adobe), and 21vianet (VNET). Current investments include BirdEye, Deliv, Dynamic Signal, Gobble, Mapper and Thrive Causemetics.

Prior to joining Trinity in 2006, Ajay was co-founder, chairman and CEO of Pinnacle Systems (PCLE), a seminal media technology company that pioneered consumer generated media creation. Under his management, Pinnacle grew into a global, multi-billion-dollar public company, won an Emmy award and completed over a dozen M&A transactions. It was acquired by Avid Technology in 2005.

Ajay is a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a 13,000-member non-profit fostering entrepreneurship worldwide. He previously served on the Board of Trustees of the Harker School in San Jose, California. Ajay is an avid skier, boatman and bicyclist.

Jai Das, President and Managing Director, Sapphire Ventures

Jai is a managing director, president and co-founder at Sapphire Ventures. He invests in startups which he believes are developing ground-breaking products and services, and have embarked on their journey to become a company of consequence. He has more than 15 years of experience helping companies innovate their product and marketing strategies in order to scale and become market leaders. Eleven of Jai’s investments have become publicly traded companies and 9 have been acquired.

Jai is currently a member of the board (director or observer) at Catchpoint, DataRobot, JFrog, Narrative Science, OpsRamp, Portworx, PubNub, Punchh, Splashtop, Sumo Logic and ThoughtSpot.

Jai’s previous investments at Sapphire include: Alteryx (NYSE: AYX), Apigee (acquired by Google), Box (NYSE: BOX), Connectiva Systems (acquired by Mara Ison), Cloudhealth Technologies (acquired by VMware), Control4 (NASDAQ: CTRL), Cyphort (acquired by Juniper Networks), ExactTarget(acquired by Salesforce), Five9 (NASDAQ: FIVN), GroundWork (acquired by Parallax), Ignite Technologies (acquired by Versata), Iron.IO (acquired by Xenon Technologies), Jaspersoft (acquired by TIBCO Software), JustDial (JUSTDIAL), MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce), Newgen Software (NSE: NEWGEN), Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), Paytm, Socrata (acquired by Tyler Technologies), Square(NYSE: SQ), and Tealeaf (acquired by IBM).

Prior to joining Sapphire Ventures in 2006, Jai worked at Oracle, Intel Capital, Agilent Ventures, and MVC Capital (a DFJ affiliated fund). He has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Brown University and an MBA from University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Joseph Floyd, General Partner, Emergence Capital

Joe’s passion for founders carries through everything he does. “Not every superhero needs to shoot spider webs from his hands. I want my children to know that there are other heroes in the world — inventors, visionaries, and business leaders, who perform heroic feats with scarce resources against all odds.”

A General Partner at Emergence and a Kauffman Fellow, Joe’s expertise in building cloud startups has evolved from over fifteen years of advising and investing in rocketship startups like SalesLoft, project44, Mya, and more. “We strive to be a founder’s most important partner every day.”

Before joining Emergence, Joe was a Senior Associate in American Capital’s technology group where he focused on investing in fast-growing internet and software companies. While at American Capital, he was involved with the team’s investments in HomeAway (Nasdaq: AWAY) and PeopleMedia (acquired by IAC). Joe was also an Associate at McKinsey & Co. in their corporate finance practice and a technology investment banker before that. Joe earned an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. While at Wharton, Joe won first place at the International Venture Capital Investment Competition. He is also a proud Cal Bear with a BA in Economics and BS in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.

Moderator: Shruti Gandhi, Managing Partner, Array Ventures

Shruti Gandhi is a professor in the CS department at Columbia University and founder of Array Ventures a data-driven venture capital firm. 6 of her portfolio companies have exited to companies such as Apple, Paypal, and Samsung with 10x returns. Shruti spun Array Ventures out of True Ventures. She is also an adjunct professor in the CS department at Columbia University, featured on Business Insider, BBC, Forbes, VentureBeat, and USAToday, and host of the Array podcast.

When not investing, she is hacking on some app or thinking about ways she can be in many places at one time. Shruti also has an MBA from the University of Chicago, where she polished her finance skills and developed engineering knowledge in CS departments at Columbia University and Marist College.

Panel 2: Data-Driven Businesses:

Subject Matter Experts tell us how businesses should reinvent themselves using data and AI.

Richard Socher, Chief Scientist at Salesforce

Richard is a chief scientist at Salesforce. Previously, he was an adjunct professor at Stanford’s computer science department and the founder and CEO/CTO of MetaMind which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He enjoys improving the state of the art in AI through research (deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision) and making AI easily accessible to everyone. In 2014, he got my PhD in the CS Department at Stanford. He likes adventures, traveling and photography. More info:

• Forbes article with more info about my bio.
• New York Times article on a project at Salesforce Research.
• CS224n — NLP with Deep Learning class he used to teach.
• TEDx talk about where AI is today and where it’s going.
• His Twitter account for announcements and photos.

Lukas Biewald, Founder of Weights & Biases

Lukas Biewald is the founder of an AI company Weights & Biases which is a developer tools for deep learning company. Previously he was the founder of Figure8 which was recently acquired by Appen for $300m. Founded in 2009, CrowdFlower is a data enrichment platform that taps into an on-demand workforce to help companies collect training data and do human-in-the-loop machine learning.

Following his graduation from Stanford University with a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science, Lukas led the Search Relevance Team for Yahoo! Japan. He then worked as a senior data scientist at Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Lukas was featured in Inc. magazine’s 30 Under 30 list.

Bala Sahejpal, Head of Data and Insights, AppDynamics

An experienced technology executive, Sahejpal brings more than 20 years of experience in the area of Data & Analytics. She is currently the Head of Data & Insights at AppDynamics where she built the company’s analytics capabilities from the ground up and is instrumental in driving data driven decisions on how customers are using AppDynamics products as well as Company’s SaaS performance. Prior to Appdynamics, she was Sr. Director, at Juniper Networks where she was responsible for developing the company’s Data and BI strategy, Big Data and Master Data management programs. Her earlier experience includes leading similar portfolio and projects at Sun Microsystems.

Moderator: Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners

Jocelyn Goldfein is a widely recognized industry expert on product strategy, infrastructure and organizational scale. Her career as an engineering leader spans from early stage startups to high-growth years at Facebook and VMware.

During Jocelyn’s tenure at Facebook, she helped convert News Feed to Machine Learning and spearheaded the transition to a ‘mobile first’ product organization. As an early engineer at VMware, she built core virtualization technology and ultimately established and ran VMware’s Desktop Business Unit, a $150M line of business. Jocelyn also held engineering and leadership roles at startups Datify, MessageOne and Trilogy/pcOrder.

As an angel investor, she’s backed over 20 startups with an emphasis on infrastructure and AI. She serves on several boards, including Harvey Mudd College, and is a visiting lecturer at Stanford University, where she received her BS in Computer Science.

Lastly, here are some of our companies that are pitching:

1) Zendar — HD Radar Company

2) Placer — Insights on foot traffic

3) EmpInfo — Employment verification platform

4) Blendid — Robotic food manufacturer

5) LiftLab — Media experimentation platform for brands

6) Almanac — One place to store and search knowledge for your company