People

Lalit Kumar, Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Lalit joined Foundation in February 2013, after 12+ years at Yahoo where he held various engineering leadership roles.

During his tenure at Yahoo, he had the opportunity to work with and lead various cross-functional teams across engineering, operations, product management and design. As a Sr. Director of Engineering for Yahoo Search, Lalit lead the engineering teams responsible for the run-time platform powering web search, mobile search and vertical search properties like image, video, news, sports and finance. He also ran engineering for various search distribution products like BOSS, and innovative experiments like Axis browser for iOS, Search Direct, etc. He played a key role in Yahoo’s search and advertising deal with Bing, leading the engineering and operations team for algorithmic search transition. He also lead the engineering team for project Search Monkey, which created a platform for third party developers and partners to surface rich, structured data in web search results – this was an industry first and was later adopted by other major search engines. Earlier, he worked closely with teams from Inktomi and Overture (acquired by Yahoo) to assimilate their technologies in the Yahoo stack.

Lalit received his MS in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill, and BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi. He was also part of the first class of Engineering Leadership Professional Program offered by UC Berkeley in 2011, which included emerging leaders from some of the top technology companies in the bay area.

Lalit lives in San Jose with his wife and two daughters. In his spare time he likes to follow NFL football and college basketball (go Tar Heels!), and watch Bollywood movies.

Email: lkumar@foundationcapital.com