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Kittu Kolluri is a General Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a leading US Venture Capital firm.

Recently, NEA closed the second largest VC fund.In this interview Kittu shares his insights about being and entrepreneur and running a start-up. Kittu starts with marketing, and explains the importance of having a marketing department. What is in-bound and out-bound marketing? What value do they add to a company?

Kittu also talks about sales, scalability and customer support. What should your sales strategy be? Should you go channel or direct? What about customer support?

Kittu is co-leading NEA’s India investment strategy along with Vinod Dham and Vani Kola. The new fund called the NEA USIndo Ventures. NEA has previously invested in Sasken and Indus Logic as Kittu points out in the interview.

He joined NEA in January 2006 and sits on the boards of Nevis Networks, PortAuthority, RingThree Technologies, and SnapTell.

Kittu started his career at SGI, and then went to co-founded Healtheon/WebMD, a high-profile company in the healthcare vertical during the dotcom boom. Kittu is also featured in Michael Lewis’ bestseller book published in 1999 The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story.

Kittu subsequently went on to head Neoteris, a SSL-VPN company that was later acquired by NetScreen, which in turn got acquired by Juniper Networks. At Juniper Networks Kittu was an executive VP and General Manager, Security Products Group.

Kittu is a graduate of IIT, Madras and State University of New York, Buffalo.

He lives with his family in the San Francisco bay area.

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