Last Friday's news of (Stanford Professor and angel investor) Rajeev Motwani's death came as a big shock. Many thoughts and memories have been flooding my mind since this tragedy and I owe it to Rajeev's memory to share the many ways in which he shaped my career and touched my life.
I first met Rajeev 18 years ago when I was in the Stanford PhD program. Rajeev was always very approachable and had such a wide variety of research interests that, even though he was not officially my thesis advisor, I ended up working with him on multiple research publications. Not only was he very brilliant, insightful and knowledgeable himself in the field of theoretical computer science, he had a wide network of researchers that he worked with and knew exactly how to make the right connections knowing who might benefit from whose knowledge or expertise. It is quite rare to come across people who are both very good at what they do but also very good at making the right connections, I believe this is what made Rajeev both a great academician as well as a successful investor.
Later after my PhD, when I started eBoodle in 1999, these very same qualities drew me back to him. Rajeev began helping us with no expectations of reciprocity, well before we put him on our advisory board. Rajeev assisted us in a variety of areas from helping me with raising financing, to recruiting people as well as connecting us with business development opportunities (including one with the then fledgling startup Google).
Over the last 10 years Rajeev's profile in the Silicon Valley community has grown a lot with the success of Google whose founders he mentored, as well as other startups that he advised or invested in through his VC firm DotEdu Ventures. Inspite of all his success, he was always very down-to-earth, always available to help and make the right introductions.
Rajeev achieved a lot in his unfortunately short life and I think Silicon valley and the world of technology has lost a great researcher and mentor. I will miss him as a Professor, a mentor and a person I could reliably lean on for help. Even though he is gone, his memory will live on through the impact that he has had on this world through the research papers that he published, the companies that he mentored and the students and entrepreneurs like me whom he taught and mentored. My condolences, and those of everybody else at Efficient Frontier, go out to his wife Asha and their daughters and I wish them the strength to cope with this tragedy and move forward with their lives.
~ by Dr. Anil Kamath
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