Rak Garg
@rak_garg
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It’s like Zack with an R. Bay native 🇺🇸🇮🇳. Product lad turned partner @BainCapVC. Investing in AI, developers, infra, & security. Grew up @Atlassian
Joined July 2009
you guys I just overheard a girl outside a Starbucks in Palo Alto yelling at her phone because her boyfriend broke up with her and said he got an offer at OpenAI and has to lock in.
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hiring is an absolute blood bath right now. if you've been in your current role for >1 year, you might be drastically underpaid!.
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thinking about the time I was a junior at UCLA, learned that our endowment was an LP in a VC fund, and emailed that fund's GP that I'm an LP and want an internship. I would go on to learn that being a student at a university whose endowment is an LP did not mean I was an LP.
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Zoho just hit $1b in ARR, and did it totally bootstrapped while opting to stay private 🤯.
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my LinkedIn bio has been “something new” for three hours and I’ve already gotten six inbounds from angels and VC firms. this funding market is something else 😂.
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BREAKING: Tiger to use Accenture for diligence instead of Bain to cut costs amidst market losses.
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Got on a bus in SF today and a guy flashed a knife at me and got into a fight with another passenger. Got off, switched buses, and another dude got on with a knife and pretended to stab a different passenger. I can’t make this shit up.
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I'm thrilled to share that I'm now a partner at @BainCapVC , and thrilled to be investing at the earliest stages in the most talented cyber security, AI, and infrastructure founders! The past three years have been some of the most fulfilling of my life and career.
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If you needed any more evidence that now is the best time to start a company, I just heard about founders charging VC’s for introductory 30 min calls 🥴.
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🚨 an actually personal life update:. we're finally done with long distance!!
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my 53 year old dad, who had a ~60 mile daily driving commute and high blood pressure pre-pandemic, just found out he no longer needs medication because he's far more relaxed without a commute/office. in this case, remote work is literally an employee health benefit.
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legit had a VC friend tell me they "intentionally leave a typo or 2 in cold emails to seem more human and approachable to founders". sometimes i really hate it here.
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Life update! . I've joined @BainCapVC as an early stage investor! I'm still focusing on all things enterprise, but now at the earliest stages. If you're in the bay, come say hi! I'm returning to SF and would love to go on a walk 👊.
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Many young people I meet want to be PMs or VCs (I'm guilty of both) but overlook partnerships/BD. These tend to be high leverage, paying you to network w/ product leaders, think about deal-making & incentives, and get exposure to technical and corp dev skills for your next move.
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Couldn't be happier to share that I married my best friend @natasha_gangal last week! The best investments truly are 10 years in the making.🫶 . Thank you to everyone who came out and celebrated with us!
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The SF to NYC pipeline has been super real anecdotally and in my friend circles, but wild to see the actual data. No wonder it feels like so many 25-35 year olds are just gone.
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if you turn the lights off and chant "I'm passionate about the intersection of business, design, and technology" 5 times fast the APM fairy will visit you at night and you'll wake up as an APM at your dream company.
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you either die an OnDeck fellow, or you live long enough to see yourself become an OnDeck employee.
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sitting at alamo square listening to an indian guy discuss the nuances of monta vista vs mission san jose on what I can only assume is a first date.
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After months of planning and strategizing. i'm now engaged to my best friend!! Big thank you to everyone who made the weekend memorable 🫶. Excited to do life with you @natasha_gangal 🥰
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I made a bunch of tech-themed candles over the holidays and still have a few left. If you want one and live in SF, let me know! Next batch is going to be infra/ai focused 👨🍳
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Today I turned 27. This year, I interviewed my parents and grandparents about their parents and grandparents, and wrote it all down. A century of history brought a lot into perspective. Would highly recommend compiling your story while you can! I only regret not doing it sooner.
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Atlassian was an incredible ride, but one of the things we didn’t do well was capture the imagination of young people, who are the literal future of work. Notion got it right.
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my angel investments are all 1-5k. definitely an extreme privilege to do even that, but you absolutely do not have to write 25k+ checks to support your founder friends.
I don't get how some of my friends in their twenties are angel investing in startups and buying businesses. Like, where is this money coming from lol.
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Pumped to continue partnering with incredible founders as a Principal at BCV. Thank you to the founders, investors, and teammates that push me to be a better partner every day. If you're building in AI/ML, data, dev tools, or enterprise, DMs are always open!.
Please join us in congratulating our newest Principal, @rak_garg. Since joining BCV last year, his insight, optimism, and intuition have been crucial to partnering with founders building the next generation of enterprise infrastructure.
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I've officially joined the investment team at @OpenViewVenture! I'm looking forward to working with awesome b2b founders and investors, and am moving to Boston in early 2021. SF pals, I'd love to see you before I go. Who should I meet on the East Coast?.
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Two observations from the last few weeks:. Infra VCs I know are privately feeling malaise over AI infra. High competition, low production rev, high val, etc. Brightest founders I know are thinking about niche verticals, defense/gov, pro-serv/ISV, offense/red-teaming, etc.
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Just saw a dude walk into an AI event, fill up a plate of food, grab three drinks out of the fridge, and walk out. Dude even got a sticker on his way out. Mad respect for the grindset/griftset.
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ZIRPs that no one really talks about anymore:.- Community-led growth .- Dev Rel being the most important GTM lever .- Modern data stack .- Github stars-based investing .- Remote work being a winning strategy .- Work/life balance influencers on LinkedIn.
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Just sent a database company an email with the subject line: "SELECT (OpenView) FROM (VCs) WHERE ValueAdd <> 'high'" . I'm not ashamed, I'm an associate.
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I’m still in the running for Fitbit’s 2016 SWE internship. The recruiter will get back to me any day now.
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Ah yes $1 Masterclass, more things for me to bookmark, put on a Notion vision board, and never look at again.
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I get my best work done late at night, but feel way better during the day if I get up early to work out. How do people reconcile this.
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1/ Super excited to announce the launch of my newsletter: Rak's Facts! First post on unbundling Splunk just dropped. New logging infrastructure, affordable data lakes, and more flexible orchestration tooling will redefine SecOps 👇.
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Such a harrowing regression. Advanced math in middle/high school gave me the chance to do research, skip expensive classes in college, and focus on learning instead of being harassed/bullied in non-advanced classes. Sad day for CA public school kids like me.
No Algebra in middle schools will be California state wide, following SF’s disastrous lead. “The process should have definitely involved STEM faculty from top CA universities with direct knowledge of what is needed for success as STEM majors. It is absurd this was not done.”.
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How it started how its going lmao
3/ Ouch. Gurley polled investor friends on Palantir valuation they'd pay. 0 had hand up above 1.5B calls it "unprofitable consulting biz".
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Today I turn 25. Feeling grateful for all the friends I’ve made, the mentors who never cease to support me, and the builders who’ve let me be part of their journey. Onwards!.
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This generation of venture investment is the greatest transfer of wealth from LPs to Nvidia ever.
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Turned 26 today. The best investment might seem like generative AI, but it’s actually flexibility. I legit have friends who can’t sit criss-cross applesauce. Invest in stretching! Number 1 thing I did last year.
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Just watched my mom make halwa and I think I'm ruined. I had no idea there was this much ghee and sugar in this thing!.
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Was hanging out with an MLE friend who claims he hasn't paid for dinner in three weeks because different VC firms keep inviting him and the same group of fifteen people to AI dinners every night.
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(1/5) I just bought a house in the Bay!. 🌅I am long CA. Local policy will change, my long-term home won't. 🏚️Real estate is opaque, uncomfortable, and slow. 🤯This would be impossible w/o DocuSign + the help of experienced friends/family. Thoughts for real estate tech 👇.
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I'd love to meet folks who are interested in Atlassian's APM program! If you're a student that was left jobless due to the pandemic, thinking about making moves into product, or just wanna learn more, I've opened up ~100 slots for 1:1s: RT for reach pls!.
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Like many of our founders, we'd been building the BCV Labs community and incubation space in stealth for much of this year. In true de-stealthing fashion, we've now got a sign. Come say hi if you're ever in Palo Alto!
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📢✨ LIFE UPDATE. Today was my last day at Atlassian! Huge thanks to everyone @Atlassian and to the APM program. I couldn't have imagined a better start to my career, and am consistently blown away by the new friends I had the privilege of meeting 💙. Stay tuned for what's next!
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no sub group of my entire life is more professionally stacked than the high school debate community.
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If you're thinking through an offer or your next move, my DMs are always open to talk about negotiating! I helped 47 people negotiate an additional $1.21m in annual comp over the last two years. Don't leave $ on the table, especially in this market!.
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@CorinneMRiley my hours in Palo Alto are happier than any happy hour I’ve ever been to in sf.
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when people think you’re tech trash but really you just like cooking
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Normalize giving early hires a dataroom. Most join off team+vision, but won't know about an inefficient model, leaky bucket problem, or straight up financial engineering to make growth look good. Early hires are angel investing w their time. They should be able to do diligence.
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At this point I'm convinced The Information has someone hiding out inside every VC and AI founder's home.
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AI valuations are like house prices in the Bay Area. It's not really about the asset, it's about how badly you want to win.
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3/24/00: Cisco peaked at ~$80 a share. Pundits proclaimed that the Internet was the new oil, and Cisco would capitalize on the greatest productivity driver ever. 20+ years later, Cisco isn't even close to its old ATH. A lot of today's growth companies might be in a similar boat.
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I bought my friend at Coinbase a beer once so I’m basically an angel investor, supported the company from day 1 to IPO, even exercised pro rata by getting him a coffee a months later, you’re all welcome.
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Finally picked a wedding venue I feel like I'm getting 58% of my day back.
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do I have any friends that invest in consumer fintech and/or crypto? got a super smart SWE friend who’s gearing up for a pre-seed 👀.
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In high school I’d ask random small businesses to see if anyone needed an engineering intern. Turns out, a few of them were using Zoho as a backend+CRM! These were small, franchised mom and pop insurance agencies, travel agencies, etc.
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Every time I land back at SFO, I’m reminded of how lucky we are to live in the eternal spring of Silicon Valley. Grateful for this place and everyone I’ve met in my 25 years here. Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!
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Today, I'm excited to announce a project we’ve been working on for the last several months: BCV Labs, a bespoke incubator and technical community for exceptional AI engineers, product people and researchers in the Bay Area.
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life update: i am now focusing full time on superconductor materials investing. lk-99 is revolutionizing everything in the enterprise from sales to marketing to customer support and advances in materials engineering will only continue to accelerate in enterprise saas.
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50k impressions, ~200 subscribers, a 70% open rate, 6 meetings scheduled with logging and cloud infra execs, and an abundance of motivation to make the next piece of Rak's Facts even better. All in the last 2 days. The internet is wild y'all.
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Don’t have fomo over Fogo. DM for invite!.
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San Francisco is still going strong! It was a blast making new friends in person at our first @BainCapVC happy hour this week. If you're building in the bay area and want to come to the next one, let me know. The more the merrier!
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Between Chamath's thirst trap and this LinkedIn DM. today's been a weird day
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I spent the last week suspended from Twitter. Lesson learned: don't sign up for cool new social apps when you're 12 years old because when you're 23 they'll find out and lock your account. @ everyone who texted me asking if I'm ok, I appreciate u💕. back to shit-posting 💪🚀.
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The problem with AI is that there are a million ways to build “apps of the future,” but very few PMs, designers, and engineers who have cracked the interaction mechanisms users want from these so-called apps. The experience problem in AI is bigger than the infra problem.
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We started an incubator. Funded entirely by us. It’s called BCV Labs. Tell us what enterprise software you want to build and my team and I will help you build a 100% feature complete version at a 100% discount (on your first million dollars of compute). We’re using AI and.
I’m starting an incubator. Funded entirely by me. It’s called 8090. Tell us what enterprise software you use and my team and I will build you an 80% feature complete version at a 90% discount. We are using AI and offshoring to make this happen.
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big day for me today. in 18 years of having an email address I never hit inbox zero (or even came close). today I got there 🥺🎉.
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Two of the three best cities for technical careers (SF and Seattle) have gutted their gifted public school programs. I went to public schools my entire life (including UCLA) and without gifted/honors programs my life would’ve looked very different. It’s a sleazy, misguided way of.
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today I had a bunch of rosé and read + closed 184 tabs across 4 devices (phone, iPad, work laptop, and personal laptop). this was the best day ever.
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Going to bathe in anti aging cream for the next month because three people at KubeCon have asked how old my kids are.
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Small TAM high ACV tweet: save the oil from pakwan chicken tikka masala and cook eggs in it. i can't believe it took me this long to figure it out.
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Just made my first angel investment 🙈 If you're a b2b founder and looking for (very) small checks hmu 🤠.
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just switched my work laptop to a Mac and its clear: mac os is the greatest enterprise software of all freaking time.
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I'll believe y'all that the Bay is over when the software engineers that look like me move to Miami. It doesn't matter where the VCs are - it matters where the builders are.
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Bit of a late update but hi friends I live in Pac Heights now and need people to go to Saint Frank and the dog park with hmu 👋👋👋
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I used to be a huge best of breed guy but ever since I started doing wedding planning, I'm all about vendor consolidation.
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I don’t normally like elevated Indian food because it’s overpriced and under spiced, but Copra in SF is the first I’d actually recommend. Absolutely fantastic and spiced the way it should be.
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Blind is that platform I want to leave so bad but have to stay on for the sauce
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had a VC interview where the dude proceeded to insult the Bay Area suburb my parents are from (I’m sorry I didn’t grow up in Atherton?) and spent thirteen minutes of our thirty minute call talking about his accomplishments at Stanford :).
tell me about the worst interview you’ve ever had.
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spent all day today meeting web3 founders & investors, and am basically convinced this is an insanely big opportunity, especially for underlying infrastructure & developers. can't believe it took me this long.
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