Impact’21 | Sanjit Singh Dang
Transcript of Sanjit Singh interview by Alan Olsen, Host of the American Dreams Show at Impact’21:
Alan Olsen: I’m visiting here today with Sanjit Singh Dang, and welcome to today’s show on American Dreams.
Sanjit Singh Dang: Thank you. Thank you very much, Alan, thank you for having me on your show the American Dreams show.
Alan Olsen: So we’re here at the at the Impact Global Venture Capital Conference. And what brings you here today.
Sanjit Singh Dang: And what brings us here is the power of the conference in terms of the junction of investors, startups and advisors that this team has put together, I think it’s phenomenal to see the ecosystem that they have brought together, especially with the top notch startups for investment.
Alan Olsen: So your organization is called the U First Capital. It’s a venture capital as a service. And tell us about how you went about creating the organization and where it stands today.
Sanjit Singh Dang: Yeah, absolutely. So my partner, Hector, and I created this organization over a couple of years ago, after almost two decades of experience in the corporate world, we saw an opportunity where corporations want to do venture capital, but they don’t have the DNA to do it. And some of them start venture capital funds, but then they tank because they don’t have either the expertise or the know how, or the modeling, etc, or the ecosystem around it. And we thought that this is a gap in the market, and especially and it’s a growing gap, in fact, in the market. So that’s the gap we are filling in for corporations and where it stands today, we have over 10 corporations that we have signed up including Hitachi, including Dowdupont now including JTB, and other Japanese corporations as well. So it’s been a great ride so far.
Alan Olsen: And then how do you help your clients where your what your value added to bringing them in? What is
Sanjit Singh Dang: Yeah, we what we try to do is help them with developing an investment strategy and identifying the investment targets, and then managing the fund. So we kind of become like an outsourced corporate venture capital arm for our corporations. And we bring value in terms of the ecosystem we have. We have been in Silicon Valley for almost two decades. So we have a pretty good network of startups then we also have deep technical backgrounds, both me and Hector, have technical PhDs. And we are able to do pretty deep tech diligence as well into the companies beyond the financial part of the diligence. So those are two big things that we bring in. And thirdly, we are able to understand what a corporate strategy means. And we are able to tie the investments that we bring investment opportunities that we drive with the corporation’s strategy so it fits in very well.
Alan Olsen: Sanjit, how would a individual go about contact you for more information on becoming a client?
Sanjit Singh Dang: Yeah, absolutely. My email is sanjit@ufirstcapital.com letter “U” f-i-r-s-t capital.com you can go to our website, there’s a contact me page, you can contact me on LinkedIn, we are accessible.
Alan Olsen: Alright, Sanjit, thank you for being with us today by visiting with Sanjit Singh Dang. And he’s the chairman and the co founder of U First Capital.
Sanjit Singh Dang: Thank you very much, Alan honor is all mine. Thank you very much.
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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.
Alan Olsen, is the Host of the American Dreams Show and the Managing Partner of GROCO.com. GROCO is a premier family office and tax advisory firm located in the San Francisco Bay area serving clients all over the world.
Alan L. Olsen, CPA, Wikipedia Bio
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Dr Sanjit Singh Dang has been a successful Venture Capitalist, Corporate Executive, Board Member, Speaker and Writer in Silicon Valley for almost two decades. He is currently the Co-Founder and Chairman of U First Capital. They provide Venture Capital as a Service to Corporations by bringing Startups, University IP, etc in the Corporate’s specific areas of interest (dedicated model). Prior to that, he was at Intel Capital where he had an excellent track record of driving 1 Exit every year: Palantir (IPO 2020), Orb Intelligence (Acquired by Dun and Bradstreet in 2020), Pinterest (IPO 2019), DocuSign (IPO 2018), Body Labs (AI startup, Acquired by Amazon in 2017 within 2 years of leading Series A investment), Voke (Acquired by Intel in 2016 within 7 months of leading Series A investment), Maginatics (Acquired by EMC in 2015 within 1 year of leading investment), and Basis Science (Acquired by Intel in 2014 within 1 year of investment). He has been an Investor and on the Board of several companies, including True Fit (AI for eCommerce, Raised $100M), Reflektion (AI recommendation for eCommerce, Raised $42M), Helpshift (AI-driven Customer Service, Raised $38M) and Enlighted (Smart Lighting, Acquired by Siemens in 2018). He is also an investor in Mirantis (Cloud Computing, raised $100M), GoodData (SaaS Business Intelligence, raised over $100M) and Arcadia Data (Big Data 2.0, Raised $26M). Sanjit has been on a US-level Tech/Innovation Policy Advisory team. He is on the Advisory Council of UN’s World Artificial Intelligence Organization. He has also been on University of California President’s Innovation Council. Sanjit has the fastest Engineering PhD from University of Illinois (2yrs 9mo after undergrad), which he received in 2000 with top research awards. He also attended the VC Executive program at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He’s an invited Speaker at several top conferences, eg SURGE/WebSummit, Venture Summit West, TiECon, Collision, ShopTalk, McKinsey Leadership Summit, Silicon Valley Open Doors, Global AI conference, etc. He’s a mentor at Stanford and Berkeley’s Entrepreneurship programs. Sanjit has over a decade of Exec leadership experience in Product Design, Business Development and Strategy across several domains: Big Data, Natural Language Processing, 3D Camera/Apps, Supply-Chain Analytics and Flash Memory. He has managed $2Bill/year accounts and executed 30 partnership deals in $100M-$2Bill range. Always striving to be ahead of the curve, Sanjit worked on Big Data Analytics before industry created the term ‘Big Data’. Similarly, he launched 2 online courses during graduate school in 1999 and published iconic papers on learnings, way before the MOOC revolution started.
Bio source: forbes.com
Alan is managing partner at Greenstein, Rogoff, Olsen & Co., LLP, (GROCO) and is a respected leader in his field. He is also the radio show host to American Dreams. Alan’s CPA firm resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and serves some of the most influential Venture Capitalist in the world. GROCO’s affluent CPA core competency is advising High Net Worth individual clients in tax and financial strategies. Alan is a current member of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (S.I.E.P.R.) SIEPR’s goal is to improve long-term economic policy. Alan has more than 25 years of experience in public accounting and develops innovative financial strategies for business enterprises. Alan also serves on President Kim Clark’s BYU-Idaho Advancement council. (President Clark lead the Harvard Business School programs for 30 years prior to joining BYU-idaho. As a specialist in income tax, Alan frequently lectures and writes articles about tax issues for professional organizations and community groups. He also teaches accounting as a member of the adjunct faculty at Ohlone College.