Team - Soma Capital

Meet the Team

Aneel Ranadive

Soma Managing Partner

- Managing Partner at Soma Capital. Early investor in Rappi, Cruise, Lendup, Embarktrucks, Astranis, Atrium, Razorpay, etc.
- Board member of Sacramento Kings NBA team
- Founder of Tag, location sharing app backed by Facebook Cofounder Eduardo Saverin and Tim Draper. Acquired by Mark Cuban in 2015
- Head of Product at Nielsen Media Sync in San Francisco
- Co-founder of GlanceGuide, video analytics company sold to Nielsen
- Founder of BoredAt, anonymous social network backed by Redpoint Ventures
- Investment Banking Analyst at Bank of America
- B.S. in Mathematics at Columbia University

Mendy Yang

Soma Cap Team

Prior to joining Soma Capital, Mendy was a Private Equity Associate and Analyst at Vista Equity Partners (software private equity firm with $57bn+ in committed capital):
Led diligence on new deals and worked closely with portfolio companies (iCIMS, IAS and Gather / Tripleseat); closed 4 platform deals and 9 add-on acquisitions during ~4 year tenure

Global Strategy and M&A Financial Analyst at AIG (global insurance company): Completed divestiture of Advisor Group (large broker-dealer network) to Lightyear Capital

Investment Banking Summer Analyst at Wells Fargo (NYC)

BS with Distinction from Yale University (2015): Economics and Psychology Double Major

Jessica Li

Soma Cap Team

Jessica Li graduated with high honors from Harvard University where she studied computer science and economics. She completed her senior thesis with Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart on foreign direct investment bargaining in China. Previously, she was at Morgan Stanley's technology investment banking group, in public markets investing at Northwestern Mutual, and has worked in startups and venture through General Catalyst's Rough Draft Ventures and Luxe (acquired by Volvo). She loves working hands on with founders creating the most impactful solutions to the most pressing challenges. In her free time, she enjoys running outdoors, boxing, cycling, and yoga.

Douglas Carney

Technical Diligence

- Technical diligence at Soma Capital
- Senior Founding Engineering Lead at Renew.com building software to assist seniors in their transition to Retirement
- Engineering Consultant for Starbucks rebuilding their E-commerce store in late 2016
- Early iOS Developer at Shimmur a social influencers engagement platform
- Cofounder of Tag, location sharing app backed by Facebook Cofounder Eduardo Saverin and Tim Draper. Acquired by Mark Cuban in 2015
- B.S. in Computer Science from Rutgers New Brunswick

Soma Advisors

Raj Verma

Fund Advisor

CEO of Memsql
- Former COO of Hortonworks
- Former COO of Tibco
- Helped scale Tibco to over $1bn in annual revenue

Justin Mateen

Fund Advisor

-Founder of Tinder, one of most valuable consumer co’s of all time. Tinder app generates more rev than Netflix app
-Seed investor in Brex, Zenefits, Alto, Homechef, Huckleberry, etc.

Trip Adler

Fund Advisor

- Founder and CEO of Scribd (Netflix for books)
- 100m monthly users, $100m in revenue, expected to IPO in 1-2 yrs
- Part of first ever Y Combinator class, one of the most successful YC companies

Mark Goldstein

Fund Advisor

- Head of Efficient Capacity Fund, private venture arm of Marc Benioff ($500m under management)
- 25 years of operational experience in fintech, SaaS, e-commerce, retail and online gaming

Our Partnership with Bow Capital

We work closely with our anchor investor Bow Capital, Vivek Ranadive’s later stage fund. Soma invests seed, and Bow invests Series A to growth stage

Vivek Ranadive

Bow Capital Partnership

- Founding partner at Bow Capital, anchored by the YC endowment . in partnership w/ Soma Capital
- Owner of the Sacramento Kings NBA Basketball team
- Developing $2bn in projects in downtown Sacramento including a new arena that has won various awards as the most high tech arena in the world
- Founder of Tibco software. Grew to over $1bn in revenue powering 80% of Fortune 500 co's and sold to Vista for $4.3bn
- Tibco provides big data, analytics and event processing and originally digitized Wallstreet
- Published multiple NYC best selling books
- Early stage investor and advisor to Google, Ebay, Salesforce and Yahoo
- Master in Electrical Engineering at MIT and Harvard business school

Grady Burnett

Bow Capital Partnership

- Partner at Bow Capital
- Pivotal in scaling two of the most important technology companies over the last two decades
- COO of Flurry where he led the company to a successful acquisition for over $200m to Yahoo
- VP of Sales and operations at Facebook. Helped scale sales and operations teams and grew revenue from $250m to over $10bn
- Director of Online Sales and Operations at Google. Ran Googles' NA AdWords sales and operations (responsible for over 50% of North America revenue)
- VP Sales at DoubleClick, helped with sale to Google
- University of Michigan and Harvard Business School

Rafi Syed

Bow Capital Partnership

- General Partner at Bow Capital
- 5+ years of investing experience at Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners
- Board observer at Mindbody, Pinterest, Raise, among others
- Studied consumer businesses and marketplaces in detail, investing in sectors ranging from real estate and financial services to food and SMB SaaS
- Rafi brings a deep understanding of customer acquisition and growth to his investing activities from his time as a product-oriented operator, and focuses on helping his portfolio companies develop profitable, scalable, differentiated growth plans
- BS in Economics and Computer Science from UC Berkeley

Suraj Patel

Bow Capital Partnership

Joined Bow Capital in 2016 as part of the founding team to help form the firm’s investment process and operations.

Prior to Bow Capital, Suraj was an early employee at Looker (analytics platform) where he ran West Coast Sales Engineering. Suraj also worked at TIBCO Software in a variety of roles, including the creation of TIBCO Engage, a marketing automation product focused on real-time, analytics-driven, customer engagement management. He started his career at Wells Fargo.

Suraj lives in San Francisco and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

Christina Dong

Bow Capital Partnership

Christina joined Bow Capital in 2018 as a member of the investing team. Prior to joining Bow, Christina was with the Boston Consulting Group where she worked on a variety of growth and investment strategy projects across the Industrial Goods and Tech, Media and Telecom sectors. She was closely involved with the IPO of a major online retailer. Prior to BCG, Christina worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Christina graduated with Honors from the University of Chicago with a BA in Sociology. At UChicago, she co-founded and ran her own nonprofit organization, BridgeMe Youth, dedicated to helping alleviate rates of sudden infant death syndrome on the South Side of Chicago.

Jamie Rodota

Bow Capital Partnership

Jamie Rodota joined Bow Capital in 2018 as Platform Associate to help build out the firm’s “Venture Bus”, leveraging the firm’s deep corporate network and relationship with the University of California to deliver value to portfolio companies. Prior to joining Bow, Jamie was on the Community team at WeWork and the Innovation and Technology team at the Sacramento Kings. With the Kings, he helped plan and execute Capitalize, the NBA’s first crowdsourced startup pitch competition. He also helped in the development and deployment of innovative technologies to make Golden 1 Center the world’s smartest arena.

Jamie lives in Oakland and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Michelle Grabau

Bow Capital Partnership

Michelle joined Bow Capital in 2018 from fitness world, where she spent the last 3 years as General Manager of two of the top Orangetheory studios in the country. She thrives on finding connections with people, building on those to establish natural community and culture. As Operations Lead, Michelle now applies this passion to Bow, where she supports the team and oversees daily operations of the firm so everyone can do their best work.

Before all this, Michelle studied kinesiology at USC and biomedical imaging at UCSF, and brings a love of biotech, life sciences, and disruptive health care.