BS People: Shekhar Kirani

Value creation

He is a typical hardened Silicon Valley person. Building scale, creating value is no small achievement. Shekhar Kirani, who recently joined global venture capital firm Accel India as a venture partner, has done that twice over in the US.

Kirani, after working with companies like Texas Instruments and Wipro, started working on his passion of creating value in start-ups first with Starfish, which was later acquired by Motorola. After that, he was involved in LightSurf, later acquired by Verisign. With this move, he became part of Verisign and, three years ago, he moved to India as the country head of Verisign.

“With my stint at Accel, I would like to enable more entrepreneurs to build value in India,” Kirani said. Lot of venture capital from Europe and the US is flowing towards India and since “Accel has a good brand among entrepreneurs, receiving around 1,000 applications to be funded on an yearly basis”, it was a logical choice for Kirani. Accel was among the early investors in Facebook and Groupon which are attracting multi-billlion-dollar valuations.

A PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, Kirani, is passionate about working with start-ups when they are at the ideation stage. “If I had started a new venture on my own, five years down the line, I would have created some value. But, being part of a venture fund, with the same five, my ROI time being spent, I would have created more value working with 20-25 companies,” he says.