Rahul Sood became general manager and partner of Microsoft Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the US-based software company, this year. Sood said: “In a nutshell, we are a platform for building successful businesses. That is what keeps us going.”
Sood joined Microsoft in 2010 as a general manager in its entertainment business. He moved to venturing, launching Microsoft’s Bing fund, which Microsoft said would “evolve” into a wider seed programme to support start-ups, when Microsoft Ventures was launched this year.
Sood spent more than four years at US-based computer company Hewlett-Packard, after they acquired Voodoo PC, a high-end personal computer business Sood founded in 1991.
He is an adviser to the board of Razer, a gaming hardware and software company, which he views “as the spiritual successor to our previous work at Voodoo PC”.
What is the future of your sector?
Sood said: “Innovation is everywhere and can come from anywhere. Almost every month we see a new billion-dollar company emerge from a different corner of the world. At the same time, access to early-stage funding is becoming easier and technologies like the cloud are helping young companies scale quickly. That is why we focus on business propositions for start-ups instead of investing only for a financial return.
“We are in a period of change. We reached a massive build-up where new technologies can be applied to advance industries, create new markets and make the world a better place. Start-ups are on the front lines of leading this revolution. We are seeing huge opportunities for start-ups that are creating a foundation for the future growth of cloud-based enterprise services, sensor technologies, and machine learning to advance almost every industry. We are thrilled to work with the next generation of billion-dollar companies, starting with innovative seed-stage start-ups.”