A visionary team of leaders

Anand Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and academic based in Silicon Valley. He co-founded two successful startups: Junglee (acquired by Amazon.com) and Kosmix (acquired by Walmart). He helped create Amazon’s Marketplace, and created and co-headed WalmartLabs. He also is a co-inventor of the concept underlying Amazon Mechanical Turk, which played a key role in the development of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Anand was an early investor in many successful companies including Facebook, Lyft, AppNexus, Aster Data, and Efficient Frontier. His academic research has won several major awards, and he is a co-author of Mining of Massive Datasets, a popular textbook on the topic of Big Data.

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Venky Harinarayan is an entrepreneur and investor. He was a founder of Junglee—a pioneering shopping search engine that was acquired by Amazon.com, a founder of Kosmix—an innovative search and categorization company that was acquired by Walmart Stores, Inc., and a founding investor in Efficient Frontier—a leading search and social media marketing company that was acquired by Adobe. Together, these start-ups were valued at $1 billion at the time of their acquisition. Venky has also played the role of entrepreneur in two of the most successful retailers of our times — Walmart and Amazon.com. Most recently, at Walmart, as Senior Vice President of Global e-Commerce, Venky created and ran @WalmartLabs, the innovation arm for the world's largest company. At Amazon.com, Venky helped create the Marketplace business, that today accounts for more than half of all the units sold. He also invented the concept underlying Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

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Prior to rocketship.vc, Sailesh was CTO and co-founder of LocBox (acquired by Square), a startup focussed on marketing for local businesses. Sailesh worked with Anand and Venky at their previous startup Kosmix, and continued on to Walmart as a Director of Engineering at @WalmartLabs. Before jumping into the startup world, Sailesh worked as a Computer Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. Sailesh earned his Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from IIT Madras, his Masters degree in Construction Management from Virginia Tech University and Intelligent Systems from University of Pittsburgh. He was a Ph.D. candidate in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Michigan.

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Madhu Shalini was the Chief Data Officer of Gojek and helped grow the business into a $1 billion unicorn. She was on the board and started the Singapore office. Prior to Gojek, Madhu was an operating partner at a 150M private equity fund building startups across South East Asia. She was part of the founding team of Intuit’s Quickbooks Lending Platform where she helped grow the platform to $300 million and holds 3 patents in the areas of user data augmented algorithms for financial inclusion.

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Wang joined rocketship.vc from @WalmartLabs, where he was a director following Walmart's acquisition of Kosmix, the startup he joined as it was being formed. Before that, Wang's dissertation work included contributions to the Stanford WebBase project and time exploring data systems at IBM Almaden. Wang obtained his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Yichen’s data-related career began with detecting fraud and anomalies within the Medicare and Medicaid system at Acumen through data mining. After joining rocketship.vc, her talents are now applied to mining startups. As evidenced by her prior work before the US, Yichen’s interests are far-ranging, from founding one of the earliest organic poultry farms in Shanghai and stage-managing hundreds of musicals at the Oriental Art Center. She has a weakness for fluffy animals, such as her Samoyed Mochi and her imaginary pet alpaca. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from Shanghai Jiaotong University and a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.

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