Last October, Priya Saiprasad got a call that, by now, was familiar: Nagraj Kashyap, her longtime mentor and colleague, wanted to poach her—again. The pair were working together at SoftBank, where Kashyap recruited Saiprasad over a year before from VC firm Mayfield. But their ties went further back: Kashyap and Saiprasad were part of the founding team at Microsoft’s corporate venture fund, M12. And last fall, Kashyap was calling to ask Saiprasad if she wanted to join him in launching a new venture fund to invest in software and AI companies.
“It's not every day that someone who's been your mentor for a really long time comes to you and says, 'Do you want to start something together?'” Saiprasad told me. The option to build something of her own with Kashyap was too tempting to pass up.
