Sameer Dholakia took SendGrid public, then sold it to Twilio for $3 billion. Now he's joining Bessemer Venture Partners, the VC firm prominently behind both.
At Twilio, CEO Jeff Lawson had made three bids to acquire SendGrid before it went public, as detailed ininto their eventual combination. Reconnected by Deeter, a board member at Twilio, too , Lawson and Dholakia announced the deal, worth about $3 billion in Twilio stock at the time, that October. Twilio’s stock is up about 60% since that announcement, although it trades at just one-quarter of February 2021’s highs. The combined company has a market capitalization of about $20 billion today.
Bessemer, which typically hires investors at a junior level and grows them from within versus making partner-level hires, stayed close to Dholakia after his departure. He joined the boards of Bessemer portfolio company Auth0, an identity management provider, until its acquisition by Okta, as well as two others: publicly-traded IT portfolio company PagerDuty and service-industry software provider ServiceTitan.
As an investor, Dholakia plans to focus on software categories consistent with those past experiences: developer tools, API businesses, marketing and sales technology and business applications for artificial intelligence. He’s not a total investment novice. Personal investments made over the past year include developer-focused startups CodeCov and Mux, marketing tech startup Spellbound, sales tech startup UserGems, vertical software business ShopMonkey and product demo software maker Reprise.
In an uneven startup fundraising market featuring firms with many millions of capital to deploy, but also valuation multiples constricting given the pullback of tech stocks on the public markets, Dholakia says his sales background will help win deals, alongside Bessemer’s thesis driven approach. During the recession of 2008, Dholakia’s first startup almost ran out of money and closed its doors. “We’re not as bad as that, and I don’t want it to be that,” he says. “But I do think we’re headed for some rough waters ahead. I would encourage founders and CEOs to get more efficient. Focus on how you’re getting through if the market goes down 20% and all of a sudden, sales are a lot harder.”
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