New Enterprise Associate’s  Managing Partner Kittu Kolluri is an engineer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-investor. In 2006 I  met with Kolluri at NEA’s Sand Hill Road office in Menlo Park, to find out how he made this transition from being an engineer to an investor.

In Part-1 of our conversation Kittu describes his transition from an engineer to an entrepreneur to an investor. Who inspired him to become an engineer? What did he learn from his mentors, one of them being the legendary investor Jim Clark.

Kolluri also talks about his childhood and growing up in Hyderabad, India and how he was inspired while in sixth grade to study engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). After studying engineering in India and the US, Kolluri started work at SGI, a company founded by Jim Clarke. While at SGI Kolluri got to work with Clarke quite closely and later on joined him at his healthcare startup Healtheon.

LISTEN: NEA’s Kittu Kolluri on Entrepreneurship and Investment Part-1

 

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

Photo credit: NEA