By Beth Miller, Engineering Momentum
Every time you wish the Internet were faster or want to save something “in the cloud,” there is a Washington University in St. Louis Engineering alumnus working to make that happen.
Gaurav Garg, who earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering in 1988 and a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1990, is the driving force behind early-stage, Silicon Valley startups looking to transform the way we use the cloud, mobile devices and big data.
Garg and business partner Peter Wagner recently launched Wing Ventures, a new venture capital firm designed to build business technology companies. Starting with a $160 million fund, Wing focuses exclusively on early-stage companies with the potential to define new categories in cloud computing, mobile and big data and to provide entrepreneurs with the financial and strategic backing to build successful companies. Wing plans to invest about $8 million to $10 million over the life of each of its portfolio companies.
But Garg is doing much more for these companies than writing a check. He is passionate about being a true friend and mentor to the entrepreneurs and sharing first-hand knowledge from his own experience with launching a highly successful technology startup, Redback Networks, in 1996. Redback, which makes edge routing technology to help carriers deliver broadband, telephone, TV and mobility services over Internet-based infrastructures, grew to $500 million in annual revenue and 1,300 employees in four years from inception. Gaurav was in the trenches, acting as CFO, chief recruiter, customer service, engineering and product management and doing whatever was needed. The company went public in 1999.
By mid-2000, Garg realized that his heart was in building companies from scratch into significant businesses. As a result, in 2001, Garg joined Sequoia Capital, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm and Redback’s first investor.
“It was the best place to learn the art and science of venture capital, while doing what I loved — backing seed-stage, early-stage and growth-stage emerging technology companies,” he says.
Garg worked with Sequoia for 10 years, investing in and working with startup companies, typically with one or two founders. He helped build multiple successful companies, including Netscaler, which was acquired by Citrix; Aruba Networks; Ruckus Wireless, which went public in November 2012 and has a $1.5 billion market capitalization, or the total value of the issued shares; FireEye, which went public Sept. 20 and has a $5 billion market capitalization; RingCentral, which went public Sept. 27, with a market cap of $1.1 billion. MobileIron, Jasper Wireless and Jawbone are all on a trajectory to go public as well.
Garg’s excitement is evident as he recalls when the founder of FireEye, Ashar Aziz, first approached him with an idea. Garg says he was immediately interested, but it took the two of them a few months to create the right presentation for venture capital funders. And the founders of Ruckus Wireless camped out in his family room to set up their first Wi-Fi router.
It takes about five to seven years to learn the venture capital business, Garg says, but the business brings big rewards.
“You start out with these foggy, uncertain and impossibly fragile entities with promising ideas and watch them evolve over time,” Garg says. “It’s the founders who are driven, smart, agile and somewhat fanatical, who persuade all sorts of communities to take chances on them with their careers, money, reputations and time.”
It takes a certain type of person to be an entrepreneur or venture capitalist.
“It takes patience and equanimity, and above all, faith in the company,” Garg says.
It can take six to nine years of hard work and long hours for the companies in which Garg invests his time, knowledge and money to come to maturity and prepare for an initial public offering.
“I don’t think of this as a job,” he says. “It’s such a privilege to watch these companies grow from two or three people to become what they have, in many cases public companies with revenue of more than half a billion dollars, and work with them over the years. You learn a lot, and it’s very humbling.”
Washington University was a new experience for Garg. About six weeks after he started classes as a freshman, he felt exhilaration and panic at the same time. Coming from India, the pace expected of a college student in the United States was a bit of a shock.
“The level of teaching and quality of instruction and professors was off the charts,” Garg says. “It was an absolute privilege and totally exhilarating.”
"My engineering background taught me to think in an organized way and to relate to technical problems."
Although Garg has three degrees in engineering, he says he also received an excellent education in economics at WUSTL.
“All of the economics classes I took were spectacular because they really opened my world beyond engineering,” he says. “Having breadth of learning today is incredibly useful to me in my job, where you have to look at everything from every angle. I’ve become better at figuring out first-order issues and variables lurking in the background.”
“Working with early-stage companies is not a great business model,” Garg says. “There are easier ways to make money. All of us in the early-stage venture business do this because we enjoy it and love our craft.”