Not once, but twice

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Meet these two folks from Chennai who almost acquired Google, not once but twice.

Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman graduated from IIT-M and went to Stanford University 30 years ago.

Their friendship began when Venky drove Anand to buy groceries in his car. They co-founded Junglee, a database technology company during their Ph.D.

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1st Attempt

Around that time, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Founders of Google created BackRub, one that became the search engine later.

Sergey and Anand had the same Ph.D advisor, Jeff Ullman through whom they got acquainted.

So, Larry and Sergey offered to sell Google for a million dollars. But they couldn't buy it since they did not have the funds.

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From Grocery Runs to $250M Exit

Subsequently, Junglee became a comparison shop engine that was acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 Million.

Now they had the funds.
Did they buy Google?

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Attempt #2: Amazon Tries to Acquire Google

After joining Amazon, they even convinced Bezos to buy Google for $300 Million.

But this time, Larry and Sergey wouldn't sell for anything less than a billion dollars.

Another miss.

After this, Venky and Anand mentioned that they are happy for Larry & Sergey and that they don't have any regrets.

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What They Built at Amazon

At Amazon, they developed:

• the marketplace business, and
• the underlying concept of Amazon Mechanical Turk

They left Amazon in 2000.

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Round Two: Acquistion by Walmart Labs

In 2005, they started a social media data and analysis company Kosmix, which raised $55 Million from Accel, Lightspeed, DAG ventures.

It was acquired by Walmart in 2011 for $300 Million+.

This became Walmart Labs - a tech shop for the retail giant Walmart.

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Investing in Facebook

Two companies. Two big exits.
Wait, there's more.

In 2000, after selling their first venture to Amazon, the duo started Cambrian Ventures, a $25 million seed-stage venture fund that backed technology startups started by Stanford PhDs.

One of their interesting investments in 2005 was Facebook.

They also invested in 10+ startups and had 5+ successful exits to many companies including Teradata, Walmart, and Juniper Networks.

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Deep Tech, Rocketship, and Cricket

In 2013, they started Milliways Ventures which invests in Deeptech startups.

In 2015, they started Rocketship.vc and invested in:

• NoBroker.com
• Khatabook
• Mad Street Den
• Apna
• Fampay
• and many other startups

With cricket viewing minutes more than Major League Soccer in the US, Anand and Venky’s latest investment is in San Francisco Unicorns - a move to bring cricket to the USA.

I have heard about serial entrepreneurs,
but this is the first time I am seeing a serial VC.

End of Story.