Singaporean VC in Silicon Valley: Interest in Southeast Asia is slowly growing

As an uber-geek who was involved in designing some of the world’s largest supercomputers for Sun Microsystems, Deepak Jeevan Kumar was seemingly on a path towards joining or starting a tech company.

But as circumstances would have it, he ended up in the venture capital world, becoming a principal at General Catalyst Partners.

Raised in India by a family of doctors, Deepak moved to Singapore at the age of 17 as he wanted to explore the world. He spent a decade in the country, became an NUS Computer Engineering undergrad, and did his Master’s in Computer Science with the Singapore-MIT Alliance. He is now a Singapore citizen.

After his stint at Sun in Singapore, his wanderlust soon took him to the United States, where he finished an MBA at Yale University and headed to Boston hoping to join a startup. He met with venture capitalists with the intent of finding out which startups were good.

It turned out the VCs found a kindred spirit.

“They came back to me, told me that they liked the way I know a lot of startups under the radar,” says Deepak, “they said, ‘why don’t you do an internship with us?’”

While he started out in Boston, Deepak soon moved to Palo Alto in 2011 to help General Catalyst build up the firm’s Silicon Valley enterprise practice.

In line with his interests, Deepak focuses mainly on cloud computing, cybersecurity, SaaS, and big data. Investments he is involved in include Altiscale, a Hadoop-as-a-service launched by ex-Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata, DataGravity, a business intelligence startup, and Push Computing, a platform for mobile user experiences.

Being a venture capitalist is a way for him to stay intellectually stimulated. One thing he’s learned working at Sun is that he cannot focus on one thing for too long. “I get excited by diversity. I’d probably make a bad entrepreneur,” he says.

His job gives him access to different problems, verticals, and founders. That enables him to engage in relationship and ecosystem building by connecting trends, people, and companies together.

“I want to be the dumbest person in the room,” he says.

More interest in Southeast Asia

Since moving to Silicon Valley, Deepak has started seeing investors show more interest in Southeast Asia. While Singapore-based startup Viki made headlines with its acquisition by Rakuten, a number of other startups from Singapore are also leaving an impression.

Startup accelerator Y Combinator has accepted its first Singapore-based teams Semantics3 and Padlet, while Nitrous, which moved to Silicon Valley recently, has received $1 million in investments from Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, and more.

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