Rak Garg

Rak Garg focuses on infrastructure software, cybersecurity and developer tools, backing visionary founders powering the future of software.

Principal
Bay Area

About Rak

Background

I was born in a small suburb of New Delhi. My father began his career there as a support engineer at Digital, which created the world’s first firewall. His fascination with the burgeoning Internet security business carried my family to Sunnyvale, CA, when it was still the land of cherry orchards.

My two pastimes in childhood, computer science and debate, became passions in college. At UCLA, I explored machine learning, networks, and cryptography while leading several entrepreneurship organizations. I grew obsessed with solving low-level infrastructure and high-level organizational problems.

I returned to the valley to build and eventually lead enterprise products at Atlassian, a BCV company. In some ways, BCV guided my career before I even knew it. Product management ingrained in me that a special team can move mountains. I think the same applies to venture.

Looking for

Founders with a balance of conviction and curiosity. Starting a company is hard. Entrepreneurship and investing force you to envision the world as it could be, not how it is or has been. I like working with founders who are convicted in their belief of the future while being reflective about their blind spots.

As a former Atlassian PM, I have a special affinity to unleashing the potential of technical teams through easier, faster, more automated developer tooling. I’m always thrilled to meet teams building for developer productivity, especially with developer-led go to market motions.

At UCLA, I researched ML techniques to help oncologists make earlier cancer diagnoses. ML has since transitioned from theoretical to ubiquitous. I’m intrigued by the next generation of AI infrastructure and AI-enabled products democratizing the power of predicting the future.

Security inflected the arc of my story. It’s what brought me here, both literally and figuratively. The shift left in security, coupled with demand and reliance on open source software, will shape the next generation of attacks and defenses. I’m looking for founders who are one step ahead, thinking about modern software architecture and the security opportunities that will be unlocked as a result.

During downtime

I enjoy standup comedy, racquet sports, hiking, camping, sci-fi anthologies, South Asian literature, biographies, Formula 1, golf, candle-making, peated whisky, and horology.

Background

4 years
2 years
2 years

Insights

The Race to $100B: The Palo Alto Networks Story

Palo Alto Networks is a company I’ve admired for a long time; it’s the world’s biggest standalone security company, has an arm in virtually every category of cyber, and is an active acquirer of dozens of pioneering startups.

Rak Garg 30 min read
Domain Insights Infra Growth

Foundation Models and Five Predictions for AI in 2023

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We’re living in a special time; we have the compute, funding, and expertise to augment wide swaths of knowledge work using foundation models (also referred to as large language models or LLMs in NLP use cases). But despite their near-magical characteristics, foundation models aren’t yet ready for primetime.…

Rak Garg, Sam Crowder, Dawit Heck 8 min read
Domain Insights Infra Apps

Rak's Portfolio