Sameer Dholakia
Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Investor
Sameer Dholakia
Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Investor
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Partner
2022 - Current
I am passionate about AI-native software companies, partnering with Anthropic (Foundation Model AI), Fieldguide (Vertical AI for Audit), Abridge (Vertical AI for Health Care), EvenUp (Vertical AI for Legal), DeepL (Translation AI) and Jasper (Marketing AI) to support their next phase of growth. Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 135 IPOs and 200 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has $20 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos at bvp.com/memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio at bvp.com/anti-portfolio).
Board Member
2021
ServiceTitan is the world’s leading and fastest-growing software technology platform for the trades, a trillion-dollar global industry. We help small business entrepreneurs run and grow their businesses. The trades industry approaches $800B in North America alone and was significantly underserved by traditional software industry leaders prior to ServiceTitan’s entrance to the market. Today, ServiceTitan powers the businesses of more than 5,000 customers, is backed by the world’s leading venture capitalists, and continues to target incredible growth. ServiceTitan unlocks for small business, the tools and support that big business has enjoyed for decades; helping everyday entrepreneurs run and grow their businesses so they can build better lives for themselves and their families.
Board Member
2019
In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time. PagerDuty is the central nervous system for a company’s digital operations. We identify issues and opportunities in real-time and bring together the right people to respond to problems faster and prevent them in the future. From digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies, over 12,000 businesses rely on PagerDuty to help them continually improve their digital operations—so their teams can spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future.
Board Member
2020 - 2021
In May 2021, OKTA completed its $6.5B all-stock acquisition of Auth0. Auth0 is the first identity management platform for application builders, and the only identity solution needed for custom-built applications. With a mission to secure the world’s identities so innovators can innovate, Auth0 provides the simplicity, extensibility, and expertise to scale and protect identities in any application, for any audience. Auth0 secures more than 100 million logins each day, giving enterprises the confidence to deliver trusted and elegant digital experiences to their customers around the world.
CEO - Twilio SendGrid
2019 - 2020
Responsible for integrating and scaling SendGrid’s industry-leading email platform (>$200M revenue, >100k+ customers) to support the creation of Twilio's customer engagement platform. Focused on culture and employee engagement through the successful integration of the companies. Worked with talented Twilio ETeam as we steered through rapid growth of $1B+ company.
CEO
2014 - 2019
Joined SendGrid as CEO in 2014 and worked with a great team to more than quadruple the company's revenue to $147 million by end of 2018. Led SendGrid's 2017 initial public offering and guided the company through its $3 billion acquisition by Twilio in February 2019. While we 15x'ed our valuation in this time, I'm most proud of the distinctive culture we built together (recognized by Great Place to Work, Fortune, Glassdoor).
Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group
2011 - 2014
Responsible for the company's rapidly growing cloud business, spanning from bare metal hypervisor through end user cloud portal. Driving aggressive open source strategy at multiple layers of cloud infrastructure stack, helping companies build private and hybrid clouds.
VP Marketing
2010 - 2011
Responsible for driving the viral adoption of the company’s server virtualization solutions. Focused product and positioning around high growth market segments, including regions (in China and India), solutions (under desktop virtualization), and disruptive technologies (cloud). Primary business sponsor for Citrix acquisition of Cloud.com in summer 2011, resulting in the formation of a new organization called the Cloud Platforms Group (combining XenServer, VMLogix, and Cloud.com teams and technologies to deliver an integrated cloud solution).
CEO
2007 - 2010
Joined pre-revenue, pre-customer start-up in virtualization management market (focused on Dev/Test). Led the company's overall strategy and execution. First US employee (engineering team in Bangalore), before building out product, sales, marketing and support teams, tripling staff. Simultaneously doubled revenues each year, added two products to portfolio, and negotiated multi-million-dollar OEM deal, ultimately leading to acquisition by Citrix.
Client Partner
2004 - 2007
Accountable for building and growing client relationships at Fortune 500 companies in targeted verticals. Responsibilities included managing multi-million dollar P&L, ensuring customer ROI, initiating and driving new sales opportunities, and developing cross-functional team members. Used customer relationships and product experience to help product team create new marketing optimization service (mining email response, search, site clickstream and order history data). Later, led an "internal start-up" (YourBillBuddy) targeting Mobile customers in India.
VP Strategic Alliances
1999 - 2002
Appointed by CEO to revitalize Alliances, develop global partnerships, and drive revenue through indirect channels. Recruited cross-functional team of 10 alliance professionals to manage partner activities with marketing, sales, client services and engineering. Negotiated multi-year, global partnerships with IBM and Accenture.
Director, Automotive Business Development
1998 - 1999
Accountable for generating revenue and developing new business models in Trilogy’s Automotive vertical. Led focused business development efforts at Big 3 OEM. Team’s work resulted in a high profile joint venture as well as a multi-year software deal valued at over $50M.
Director, Pricing Product Group
1995 - 1998
As company's first Product Manager, led effort to develop Trilogy’s second major software application, focused on improving efficiencies in the pricing process. Sold first customers directly (6- and 7-figure deals), created product roadmaps and positioning, and directed marketing tactics to establish new market category for Pricing Software. As Director, responsible for growing and managing Trilogy’s pricing software business unit. Created $25M business from first prototype in less than 3 years.
Education
Investments
Latest Articles
The Cloud 100 - Bessemer Venture Partners
Talks about 2024 Cloud 100 cohort, Centaur status and annual recurring revenue (ARR)
Seven product strategies to prevent churn for B2B AI app leaders - Bessemer Venture Partners
Talks about B2B AI apps, churn prevention and AI app user retention