That insight became his investment thesis. While Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz were chasing growth-at-all-costs, Raghuvanshi began writing small checks to “boring” infrastructure companies: supply chain logistics, industrial IoT, and B2B compliance software. In 2010, he launched Equanimity Ventures with $47 million from a handful of wealthy Indian families and ex-Sun colleagues. His first fund was considered embarrassingly conservative. He passed on Uber (“unregulated taxi service with a legal time bomb”), passed on Snapchat (“ephemeral messaging for teenagers is not a moat”), and passed on WeWork (“they sell office space wrapped in a cult”).
He mentors a small group of young founders, mostly first-generation immigrants. One of them, Priya Mehta, founder of supply chain startup , says: “B.S. asked me a question no other investor did: ‘What will your company do when the market turns against you for five years?’ Everyone else asked about TAM [total addressable market] and traction. He asked about character.” The Legacy Question At 58, Raghuvanshi is beginning to wind down. He’s raised a final, $300 million fund—small by today’s standards—and plans to retire by 2030. He is writing a book, tentatively titled The Tortoise Manifesto . bs raghuvanshi
“He made complex systems simpler,” he says finally. “And he was kind.” That insight became his investment thesis
“I lost everything—my savings, my marriage, my belief that hard work guaranteed anything,” he told me over coffee in Palo Alto. “But I gained the only thing that matters: the realization that most people in tech are solving the wrong problem. They optimize for speed. They should optimize for survival .” His first fund was considered embarrassingly conservative
His first job was at Sun Microsystems, writing firmware for SPARCstations. By 1996, he had co-founded a networking startup called . It failed spectacularly in the dot-com crash of 2001.