(Photo: Haystacks by lin padgham)

Semil Shah

I am currently an investor. I’m a Venture Advisor to GGV Capital, and I manage three funds I’ve created called Haystack, which is proud to be an early investors in over 70 companies, such as Instacart, DoorDash, Hired, Coin, Navdy, Managed By Q, and many others. In the past, I have been a formal paid consultant to a handful of VC firms ncluding General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Trinity Ventures, Bullpen Capital, and GGV Capital.

Before moving into investing full-time, I worked on product and product marketing at Swell (by Concept.io) for almost two years, until the company was acquired by Apple. Prior to that, I spent six (6) months in 2012 as an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm investing in software startups for consumers and the enterprise, as well as in cloud technologies and infrastructure. Prior to this, I’ve held operational roles at Votizen and Rexly (acquired by Live Nation) and was an Official Columnist at TechCrunch from January 2011 to April 2014, where I wrote a weekly column on Sundays (“Iterations”) and created a weekly television show on Thursdays (“In the Studio),” where I host founders, operators, and seed-stage and venture capital investors in the TechCrunch TV Studios. I have written extensively on the forces changing high-technology venture capital, how the industry is transforming, and consumer-facing and enterprise IT technologies. For more information, please visit: www.semilshah.com/about