Portfolio/Investments
FUND Portfolio
PARTNER SPECIFIC Portfolio
Partners
Ankur Pansari, GENERAL PARTNER
Ankur leads Google’s west coast partnerships with startups and venture capital firms. He is the former CEO of Artillery, a video game company in Palo Alto, CA that raised $11m in top-tier venture capital and formed partnerships with Day9TV and Tencent in China. Prior to Artillery, Ankur was a member of Facebook's Platform Partnerships founding team and touched over 250 partnerships where he managed the Facebook experience on 50m mobile devices. Prior to Facebook, Ankur helped distribute hundreds of millions of Google Toolbars where he received the highly prestigious Google OC award — Google's second highest honor.
AARON CRUM, LIMITED PARTNER
Aaron has over a decade of corporate development experience. He currently leads corporate development at Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) where he is responsible for sourcing and acquisitions. Prior to that, Aaron led over $1b in M&A at Yahoo and before that, led M&A teams at Google and Navteq. Aaron has a MBA in Analytical Finance from University of Chicago and a B.S. in Economics from George Washington University.
Jeffrey Bloom, limited PARTNER
Currently an investment professional at Lexington Partners one of the world’s largest managers of secondary private equity and venture capital funds. Prior to Lexington Partners, Jeff was an investment banker at Credit Suisse in Mergers & Acquisitions advising corporations including ConocoPhillips, Aetna, Genzyme. Rio Tinto, and MetLife. Jeff is an active investor and prior to Brighton Angel Partners was an early angel investor in Trunk Club (sold to Nordstrom), Artillery and Dinner Lab.
arul velan, general PARTNER
A startup veteran who has developed and overseen $350,000,000+ in revenue and capital allocation at the earlier stages for some of the fastest growing startups in the last decade, including Facebook and LivingSocial. Arul’s specialties are revenue growth and biz ops, having managed 50%~ of Facebook’s revenues and led growth initiatives for 60%~ of LivingSocial’s revenues. Having founded or scaled five startups, Arul is now an angel investor as well as a startup advisor actively helping 20-30 startups each month. He is an alumnus of Stanford Graduate School of Business, Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, and Phillips Exeter.
susan loh, LIMITED PARTNER
Susan is a seasoned HR executive with over 10 years of experience. She is currently VP of People at ClassPass where she leads all people operations. Prior to ClassPass, Susan was VP of Talent at Foursquare helping scale the organization from its infancy. Susan cut her teeth earlier in her career as Lead Recruiter at Yelp and Technical Recruiter at Google. She has experience scaling companies from 25 employees to 600, with a particular passion for organizational design and talent development.
MIKE BLOOM, LIMITED PARTNER
Currently a tax attorney at Venable LLP in New York, Michael advises small businesses, mid-market companies, and high-net worth individuals on U.S. federal and state income tax issues. At Venable LLP, Michael has advised CEOs/founders on issues relating to choice of entity, QSBS status, inbound and outbound investments, fund structuring, and taxable & non-taxable mergers and acquisitions. Michael received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania..
sid murlidhar, LIMITED PARTNER
Sid worked at Facebook for over 4 years where he shipped several mobile products helping scale the service from 50M to 500M mobile users. He conceived, built and launched Facebook Zero which was instrumental in growing Facebook's user base in developing countries and was the basis for internet.org that is expanding internet access for the world's unconnected. More recently he worked at Cyanogen (An Android OS) where he headed up product partnerships.
NATE LUCASH, LIMITED PARTNER
Nate Lucash is an Engineering Manager at Google where he has helped scale the AdSense business for the last decade. Nate holds advertising related patents that have helped improve the eCPM yield for AdSense products. Nate has a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
References
Jacob Jaber, CEO, Philz Coffee
Ankur's a passionate customer of our products and helps sell our story wherever he goes. He helped us connect us with a key partner in our early days and has recently helped us fill some key requisitions. He works hard to add value and I recommend working with him.
Mehul Nariyawala, Co-founder, Flutter
I can unequivocally say that without Aaron's guidance, intros, and help, Flutter would not have been acquired by Google. He was always there to walk us through every step of the way from making us understand the core issues to how a buyer thinks about them. He helped us prioritize what was important during the acquisition process and helped us arrive at a significantly better outcome.
Harry Glaser, CEO, Periscope
Ankur is one of our most helpful angels. He is my go-to for fundraising help and CEO advice. When I send him promising entrepreneurs, I rest easy that he will work with them to get their rounds closed.
BRIAN SPALY, CEO, TRUNK CLUB
Jeff has a great eye for investing in and supporting promising CEOs and start-up businesses. Not only was he an early investor in Trunk Club, but he was a passionate fan of our business from the beginning. I would certainly recommend Jeff as an angel investor.
MADELAINE D’ANGELO, CEO, ARTHENA
Ankur has been one of our most helpful angel investors. His personal CEO experiences are invaluable to first-time entrepreneurs and he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. He's an expert fundraiser and helped bring in some of our most important venture investors. We love working with him.
BRIAN BORDAINICK, CEO, DINNER LAB
I have found Jeff to be a tremendous investor and advocate of both our company and early stage startups in general. He has a great skill in connecting folks that provide great value for the company and has always been willing to listen to new and fresh ideas. I think any startup or business for that matter would be lucky to have hi
JONATHAN BEEKMAN, CEO, MAN CRATES
I knew I'd like Arul the moment I met him. He's genuinely interested in helping startup founders succeed and is a much needed encourager when you're in the trenches. He's a natural connector and is very proactive in making introductions and pulling other smart people in as you're working to solve tough problems. He's a great investor to have on your team like we do at Man Crates and if you have the chance to work with him, I'd do it.
CHRIS ERICKSON, COO, APARTMENT LIST
Arul is one of the most genuinely thoughtful investors I have met - he gets to know the business, but equally important he gets to know the team and really understand what makes them tick. He takes the time to truly listen and as a result often asks the insightful questions that others miss. He is also one of the most responsive and loyal people I know. He's easily one of the top 3 people I turn to get something done. If he's on your team you can always count on him to follow through and help out.
ASHWIN CHERIYAN, CEO, THISTLE
Arul is an investor in Thistle and is one of the most active, sharp, insightful and helpful people to back our vision. He has a tremendous personal network which makes complete sense as people are drawn to him for his compassion, humility and sound guidance. Building a company is incredibly hard but it is made that much more easy when you have guys like Arul along for the journey.
DAVID KANEL, CEO, BOXC
Arul can bring his massive network of investors and partners that could be very important to any startup during the early stages and beyond. His encouragement and words of wisdom have been invaluable to me, he is a true visionary.
CHRIS HERNDON, CO-FOUNDER, APARTMENT LIST
Here at Apartment List we've been fortunate to receive investments from dozens of impressive angel investors, and I must say that Arul rises to the top as our favorite. He thoroughly understands our business and the levers it's going to take for us to succeed. He delivers whenever we ask for his help, like when he locked down an epic keynote speaker for our customer conference. Unlike many investors, he never bogs us down with unsolicited intros or cumbersome reporting requests. He's uniquely supportive of our company and our culture having been one of few investors to attend our annual holiday parties and customer conferences. Finally, he's able to invest much larger checks than your typical angel by syndicating the deal (in a clandestine fashion) to an impressive network of additional angels.
PASCAL MILLAIRE, PRESIDENT, FINGI
Arul is an incredible asset to have supporting your early stage company. Think about him as part-time Executive, business development referral goldmine, connector to other companies in the space, cheerleader in the good times, supporter through the most challenging of times, gatekeeper to a bunch of awesome investors, brainstorming thought partner and just a great guy to chat to. He was all of these things to me and more as an investor in Fingi. I can safely say he was the most multi-faceted source of help I had as a startup leader and officer. He has an amazing network and wasn't afraid to put it to use to help. I loved being able to go into a meeting with him, with a list of the most important challenges I was dealing with and walk away with great ideas and connections to new people to speak to for each of them. If you have a chance to work with Arul - jump on it!
ART AGRAWAL, CEO, YOUR MECHANIC
Arul is an angel investor in our startup (YourMechanic). The thing that stood out most when I first spoke with Arul is that he truly cares about helping people. You can immediately tell that he is a super duper nice guy. Ever since we took his investment, he has proactively reached out to us to see if he can help in any way. He made number of intros that helped us close our round, and now he is helping us with business development/partnerships. We have over 100 investors in our company and he is, without any doubt, among the top 5 investors in terms of value other than money. We are lucky to have him as an investor and a friend.
TARUN DESIKAN, VP-PRODUCT, MOOVWEB
I've known Arul for a long time and I jumped at the chance to work with him during Moovweb's Series B financing in 2013. Arul is as honest and diligent in his professional investing as he is in personal life. He had done his research on our space and came with a set of thoughtful probing questions. Once he made up his mind, he brought his syndicate together quickly and closed within a week. I look forward to working with him again soon.