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Learning to Drive One Selfie at a Time
Talks about Self Driving Cars, Tesla and Network Effect
VM
Vishal Makhijani
Investor at Shabodi
San Francisco, California
Overview
Vishal Makhijani is an experienced operator and investor at Shabodi, serving as a member of the Board of Directors. With a background in online advertising and social games, he has held leadership roles at companies like You.com and Change.org, showcasing expertise in operations management and strategic partnerships.
Notable highlights of Vishal's career include serving as the Chief Operating Officer at You.com and Change.org, as well as making strategic investments in companies like Trimian and Instawork through Shabodi.
Work Experience
Chief Operating Officer
2024 - Current
You.com is an AI chatbot and search engine that uses LLM to deliver personalized responses to queries with human-like replies.
Raised $95,000,000.00 from Georgian, SBVA, Day One Ventures, Alumni Ventures, DuckDuckGo, NVIDIA and Salesforce Ventures.
Investor, Member of Board of Directors
2020
Advisor
2008
Advised on business development and product strategy
Chief Operating Officer, President & CTO - Interim
2022 - 2023
Change.org is social change platform with over 150 million users worldwide.
Raised $72,000,000.00 from Greylock, Y Combinator and Bill Gates.
President & COO
2019 - 2022
Zumper is the largest privately owned rental platform in North America with a mission to make renting a home as easy as booking a hotel.
Raised $180,200,000.00 from Kleiner Perkins, Goodwater Capital, Dawn Capital, Greycroft, E-Ventures, Headline, Blackstone Group, Tony Jamous, LAUNCH and Conviction VC.
Board Member
2012 - 2019
Investor and board member - Advisor to founder/CEO - Design and product consultant - Product strategy
Copper offers customer relationship management solutions for companies that use Google applications.
Raised $102,000,000.00 from Norwest Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Industry Ventures, True Ventures, Industry Ventures, Google Ventures, DHVC and Norwest Venture Partners.
CEO
2016 - 2018
Udacity is a proven leader in online education. Udacity is disrupting the world of higher learning by delivering global access to a cutting-edge, high-quality education at a fraction of the cost of traditional higher learning. Udacity pioneered Nanodegrees which are fast becoming the new credential signalling to employers and technology workers that the holder has cutting edge skills in high-demand categories. I joined the company as COO in early 2013. The company had no revenues and no consumer traction. In the next 5 years, we introduced OVER 30 Nanodegree programs, scaled bookings to a $100 million run rate, launched operations in 5 major international markets and raised $130 million from brand name venture capital firms.
President, Chief Operating Officer & Board Member
2013 - 2016
Advisor & Investor
2012 - 2018
- Fund raising - Business and product strategy - Counsel to founders/CEO
Pepperdata provides real-time, automated cost optimization for Amazon EMR & EKS with no manual tuning and no application changes
Raised $22,000,000.00 from Signia Venture Partners, Citi Ventures, Maynard Webb, Wing Venture Capital, Mike Bergelson, Morado Ventures and Silicon Valley Data Capital.
Advisor
2012 - 2014
Product and Corporate advisor
Education
BS
1987 - 1992