Startup Stories and Strategies

Power-Law Returns in Venture Capital: Strategies for Building and Working with Great Companies

Wednesday, October 5, 2016
4:10 pm to 5:30 pm
Sandeep Bhadra, Menlo Ventures

Live stream: Power-Law Returns in Venture Capital

Power-Law Returns in Venture Capital: Strategies for Building and Working with Great Companies

Returns of individual investments at top performing funds are dominated by a few companies. At the same time, driving returns is harder than ever for venture funds due to cheaper sources of non-venture capital once startups achieve early product-market fit. This is forcing firms to ‘go early or go big’ in their investment strategies. This talk will describe what venture capital firms look for in potential investment candidates, and ‘long-term greedy’ strategies for founders when raising capital.

If you plan to work for, rather than create, a startup, the second part of the talk will discuss frameworks to select potential employers that optimize your investment of time into building your career. Trade-offs include working with early vs. established teams, building experience vs. wealth, and fast-growing vs. medium-growth ventures.

Sandeep Bhadra joined Menlo Ventures in 2015 and focuses on enterprise investments. Companies in the Menlo portfolio he is involved with include AppDome, Platform9, Signifyd, and Unravel Data. Sandeep was most recently with Cisco’s corporate business development team working on acquisitions and investments in cloud, enterprise infrastructure software, and big data/analytics. Sandeep was actively involved with Cisco's acquisitions of tail-f (SDN orchestration), Metacloud (Openstack private cloud) and Memoir Systems (next-gen network memory), and investments in Map-R, Platfora and Moogsoft (big data / analytics).

Earlier, Sandeep was an engineer at Texas Instruments’ R&D unit, where he led projects to build an Openflow switch chip, an ultra low-power IoT wireless mote, and 4G/LTE small-cell networks.

Sandeep received a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree from IIT Madras, both in electrical engineering, and an MBA from INSEAD. In his spare time, Sandeep likes to travel up and down the Pacific coast with his dog, read fiction, and drink burgundies.

Last updated:

November 15, 2016