Mr. Ursheet Parikh
B.Tech., 1998, Computer Science & Engineering

Mr. Ursheet Parikh is a Partner in Mayfield Fund. Founded in 1969, Mayfield is one of the oldest and most respected Venture Capital firms in Silicon Valley that has funded over 500 start-ups leading to well over 100 IPOs. Mr. Parikh encourages and invests in enterprises focusing on deep technology and helps entrepreneurs build amazing products and companies for global markets.

In 2009, Mr. Parikh co-founded StorSimple, which pioneered a new category of business data storage product called – Cloud-integrated storage. By 2012 the company became a market leader as the product fundamentally disrupted the $50 billion market for business data storage. In the same year, the company was acquired by Microsoft, which continues to sell products under the StorSimple brand and has often highlighted StorSimple as one of its most successful acquisitions.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Parikh has been the Director, Product Management at Cisco Systems where he started the WAN acceleration product line (WAAS) for Cisco that makes applications run 10x-50x faster across the world. WAN acceleration was one of the key enabling technologies helping the offshoring happen. It made offshore tasks with information on US servers go from minutes to seconds on the same network which was like magic for users. Cisco’s WAN acceleration product became the leader product in the world in its category in 2008. Before joining Cisco Systems, he was the Product Manager at Andiamo Systems which delivered the first secure storage network infrastructure that was able to get the highest security certification of the US Federal Government. Andiamo Systems was acquired by Cisco in 2004.

He was also the Co-founder of Jalva Media Inc. – one of the first digital content start-ups in India. The company pioneered delivering Bollywood video content on the internet and had many firsts to its credit including the first webcast of a Bollywood event (IIFA awards, held in London in June 2000), delivery of online video for TV companies in India and creating the first offshore video services company in India.

Mr. Parikh obtained his B.Tech. degree in 1998 from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA. Under his leadership, StorSimple won many awards and accolades for its products and inventions. Notably – Storage Magazine awarded the ‘Storage System of the Year – 2011’, the only Gartner Group Cool Vendor for Cloud Storage, BizSPark Partner of the Year from Microsoft; Best Product Award from SQL Server Magazine and many more. Also, Cisco’s WAN acceleration product started by Mr. Parikh won leading industry awards like ‘Best of Interop 2008 for Network & Application Performance’. Cisco moreover, bestowed Mr. Parikh with the ‘Pioneer Award’ for leading this effort and a special CEO award for ‘extraordinary contribution to technology’.

Anything and everything about technology and entrepreneurship excites Mr. Parikh. A fitness enthusiast, he likes to travel and read as well.

Special Memories

“I was able to make friends for life at IIT Bombay. The lessons learnt on entrepreneurship from Prof. D.B. Phatak and Prof. S.S.S.P. Rao at the Institute, were invaluable. Raising Rs 25 lakh for the inaugural edition of Techfest drove us crazy, but it enabled the fest to become one of the largest student festival in the Country, right from beginning. I was also involved with student-alumni engagement activities and became the first Student Alumni Secretary of IITB.”