The Rubik’s Cube has 43 quintillion combinations – but only one solution. At age 11, Ashu found that solution in 25 seconds flat. Although Ashu hasn’t picked up a Rubik’s Cube in quite a while, he still takes great pleasure in solving complex business challenges.

To give just one example, in 2010, an early stage Berkeley-based company that specialized in analytics wanted to get into the media-buying platform business. Ashu helped their small team reach the growing number of brands that were migrating their television advertising to the web. That company, TubeMogul, soon became the leading video-advertising platform for brand advertisers, went public in 2014, and was acquired by Adobe in 2016.

Ashu works with startups across the enterprise stack. He is particularly excited about how AI is reinventing existing software categories and creating new consumer experiences. And he has invested in AI-enabled business applications, AI infrastructure, the datastack cyber-security and online video.

Ashu is an early investor in one decacorn (Databricks) and six unicorns (Cohesity, Eightfold, Amperity, Turing, Anyscale, and Alation) … so far. He also serves on the boards of Anvilogic, Arize, Coefficient, Conviva, Fortanix, Ikigai Labs, OpsMx, Skyflow, and Docket. In addition, Ashu was responsible for Foundation Capital’s investments in Aggregate Knowledge (acquired by Neustar), Custora (acquired by Amperity), FreeWheel (acquired by Comcast), TubeMogul (acquired by Adobe), and Tubi.tv (acquired by Fox).

Ashu is passionate about helping technical founders find product-market fit, and scale as CEOs. His podcast B2B a CEO has featured Eric Yuan, Ali Ghodsi, Jennifer Tejada, Aaron Levie, and Frank Slootman.

Before joining Foundation Capital in 2008, Ashu was the general manager for Microsoft’s online-advertising business and led field marketing for the software businesses. Previously, Ashu worked at McKinsey & Company, helping technology companies scale their go-to-market efforts. Earlier in his career, Ashu founded TringTring.com, one of the first search engines in Asia, set up Unilever’s Nepal operations, and led the marketing and pre-sales teams at Cadence Design Systems.

Ashu has a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management at Bangalore, where he received the President’s Gold Medal.

Ashu has lived in India, Nigeria, and the Sudan, and today makes his home in California with his wife, Pooja (an entrepreneur), and their two sons.