Silicon Valley Leadership Circle

Sanjay has over two decades of international experience spanning the domains of investments, management consulting and business development. He has extensive business and personal relationships with leading executives, investors, and institutions in the US-India corridor, including a significant concentration of high net worth individuals, family offices, and venture capital/private equity firms. Sanjay is the Founder & President of Action For India (AFI), an initiative to help social innovators in India overcome barriers to scale and achieve greater impact at the Bottom of the Pyramid. AFI connects social innovators with impact investors, mentors, technology resources, government contacts and local partners. AFI is headquartered in New Delhi, India and has a chapter in Silicon Valley, California. Launched in 2012, AFI is inspired and guided by Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India and Chairman of India's National Innovation Council. Sanjay is also a co-founder of the Center for Healthcare Innovation, a best in class US based research center and thought-leadership institution focusing on the life sciences. He led CHI’s effort to engage top healthcare, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical executives, entrepreneurs, and investors, with a concentrated focus on the US and India. Previously, Sanjay served as a Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives at Hetero Drugs, India’s largest privately held pharmaceutical company. Sanjay was also with The Seven Hills Group, a US based family office making investments in the US-India corridor. During his five year tenure with the firm, The Seven Hills Group has invested more than 50M USD across a variety of sectors including Media & Entertainment, Healthcare, Technology, Clean Tech, Education and Real Estate.
Sanjay is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs, the world’s largest network of entrepreneurs, and served as a Co-Chair for TiECon East, one of the largest innovation focused conferences in the US. Sanjay founded the AP Technology Leadership Council, a non-profit networking organization created to provide pro-bono business consulting services to civic and governmental causes in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. In an earlier role, Sanjay served as the Chairman of the Editorial Board of IIT Maanas, the alumni magazine of IIT Madras. Sanjay is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Srini Akkaraju has over 16 years of investment and operational experience in the life sciences sector. He joined Sofinnova in 2013 as a General Partner, and concentrates on biopharmaceuticals investments. Srini’s board memberships have included Piramed (acquired by Roche), Eyetech Pharmaceuticals (EYET), Synageva BioPharma (GEVA), Seattle Genetics (SGEN),Intercept Pharmaceuticals, (ICPT), Ophthotech and Versartis.Most recently, Srini was a Managing Director at New Leaf Venture Partners. Prior to NLVP, he was a co-founder and Managing Director at Panorama Capital. Before forming Panorama, he served as Partner of J.P. Morgan Partners. Prior to J.P. Morgan Partners, Srini held business and corporate development positions at Genentech. He received B.A. degrees in both Biochemistry and Computer Science from Rice University and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in Immunology from Stanford University School of Medicine.

Raj Atluru joined Silver Lake in 2011 and is a Managing Director of Silver Lake Kraftwerk. He has been investing in the energy and resource sectors since 1996, both domestically and in emerging markets. Prior to Silver Lake, Mr. Atluru was a Partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson for 11 years where he spearheaded DFJ’s cleantech investment practice since 2001 and its India investment operations since 2005, leading DFJ’s partnership with Element Partners in 2005 to co-found one of the largest dedicated cleantech funds. Mr. Atluru has led numerous investments in companies specializing in renewable energy, energy storage, smart grid and energy efficiency applications, wireless technologies, and business software and services. On behalf of Silver Lake Kraftwerk, he previously served on the board of directors of SolarCity (SCTY). In addition, he serves on the advisory board of the Cleantech Investors Forum and co-founded The Spotlight Fund, a non-profit dedicated to funding start-up educational entrepreneurs. Mr. Atluru holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Civil/Environmental Engineering and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Mark Granovetter is the Joan Butler Ford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Professor Granovetter is currently concentrating on two main projects: One is a book with the preliminary title Society and Economy: The Social Construction of Economic Institutions, to be published by Harvard University Press. This volume represents an attempt to develop a new synthesis on the sociology of the economy. An early version of the scheme that informs the book is in the 1985 American Journal of Sociology paper, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness". Other material related to the projected book is contained in the paper for the Friedland/Robertson volume, in the Acta Sociologica paper, and in papers in five volumes edited, respectively, by Nohria and Eccles, Swedberg, Ortiz and Lees, Portes, and Guillen et al. He is also conducting research on the sociology of industrial organization. One study is called the "Silicon Valley Network Analysis Project" (SiVNAP) Though everyone agrees that the most crucial aspect of Silicon Valley’s dramatic success is its networks, there has been virtually no systematic study of their history, structure and functioning. This study inquires about these networks and their evolution over time, and also investigates the institutional complex that supports local industrial activity, including financial, educational, legal, and political sectors. Another industrial organization project (which began as a collaboration with the late Patrick McGuire, University of Toledo) concerns the origins and early development of the electricity industry in the United States. Extensive archival and secondary research shows that individuals mobilizing financial, technical and political resources through their social and professional networks pushed the industry in certain directions, with substantial historical contingency and path dependence. Technology and organizational forms were not simply responses to technical or economic exigencies; in fact, technical and organizational forms shunted aside in this period, and then forgotten, were far more plausible technically and economically than usually supposed. Some such forms, such as the decentralized production of power in homes and factories, and the separation of distribution from production, began to re-appear in the late twentieth century as the "wave of the future"; ironically, this study shows these to be, in fact, the wave of the past.

Basab is the President and CEO of CliQr. Their groundbreaking technology enables businesses to quickly and efficiently move, manage, and secure applications from any on-premise physical or private cloud environment onto any private, public, or hybrid cloud without the need for a costly and complex migration. Basab has previously held executive positions with Infosys and led the startup up Gridstone. Basab is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

Prasad Ram (aka Pram) is the Founder, CEO and Chairman of Gooru. While working at Google, Pram devised a prototype to address his problem of finding age and topic appropriate educational resources on the web. What began as a "20% effort" evolved into a year-long pilot in India that included 1,000 students across 25 classrooms. Pram subsequently left Google to pursue Gooru as a non-profit education technology start-up that would develop Gooru, a search engine for learning. Pram has previously worked at Xerox Research, Dynamx Technology (co-founder), Yahoo! and Google. Pram has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from UCLA, and he obtained his B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT-Bombay.

Raju Reddy is the executive vice president for Global services at Hitachi Consulting. In addition, Raju serves on the boards of both Hitachi Consulting U.S. and Hitachi Consulting India entities. Raju previously was the Founder and CEO of Sierra Atlantic, a company that grew to be a best-in-class global services company over a period of 17 years under his leadership and was consistently ranked amongst the best managed companies. Sierra Atlantic was acquired by Hitachi Consulting in December 2010. Prior to founding Sierra Atlantic in 1993, he spent 10 years at Intel in software development, marketing, and general management. Raju is actively engaged in the community and serves in leadership roles in various non-profits and enjoys working with young entrepreneurs in a mentorship role. He currently serves on the Board of India Community center in Milpitas, California and is the Chairman of BITSAA Intl, the alumni body of India's #1 private University, BITS Pilani. Prior to this, he served as a member of the Board of Trustees for Puente, a Wharton School non-profit program which helps under privileged communities worldwide gain access to technology. He also co-founded SIPA (Silicon Valley Indian Professional Association) in 1987 and was instrumental in starting the TiE Chapter in Hyderabad, India. Raju holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from BITS Pilani and a Master of Science degree in computer science from Virginia Tech.

Radhika is a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. She is involved in civic engagement initiatives and also advises and helps organizations that leverage technology for social impactsuch as Samasource, the LurdesMutola Foundation- helps educate girls in rural Mozambique, and CGNetSwara – helps empower the voice of tribal Indians.She is an alumna of the Stanford CS Dept and U.C Berkeley Haas School of Business and is an active mentor at Stanford’s Startx Mentor Labs, Berkeley SkyDeck Labs and at RajeevCircle of which she is a founding volunteer.

Steve Toben is the president of the Flora Family Foundation in Menlo Park, which supports the philanthropic activities of the descendants of Bill Hewlett, co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard Company. Interests of the Flora Family Foundation include international development, the environment, K-12 education, and arts, culture and humanities. Before coming to the Flora Family Foundation, Mr. Toben served as a program officer at the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation where he directed the Foundation’s programs on environment and conflict resolution. Prior to joining the Hewlett Foundation, he practiced law for several years in both the public and private sectors. Mr. Toben currently sits on several nonprofit boards of directors and advisory councils, including the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation in New York, Legacy Works in Palo Alto, Northern California Grantmakers in San Francisco, and the Great Valley Center in Modesto. He was elected to the Portola Valley Town Council in November 2003. Mr. Toben is a graduate of the Yale Law School and the University of North Carolina, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Mr. Wilbur is a Trustee and former President of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He is currently serving as Interim President and CEO, The California Wellness Foundation, Woodland Hills, CA. During his tenure as the Foundation President from 1976 to 1999, the Foundation grew from a two-person staff and $8 million in annual grantmaking to a $13 billion foundation with 155 employees and awarding more than $500 million a year. Now, as a Trustee, he is active in support of the Foundation’s environmental initiatives including encouraging smart growth and energy conservation by Chinese policy makers. Mr. Wilbur received the Council on Foundation’s prestigious Distinguished Grantmaker Award in 1999. Prior to joining the Packard Foundation, Mr. Wilbur was executive director and CEO of the Sierra Club Foundation, designing and administering this important fundraising arm of the national environmental organization. In addition to the Packard Foundation Board, Mr. Wilbur serves on the boards of Colorado College, the Institute for Global Ethics, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, The Stanford Theatre, and Philanthropic Ventures Foundation. He is on the Steering Committee of the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers and a number of advisory boards. Mr. Wilbur received both his undergraduate and Master of Business Administration degrees from Stanford University and is the co-author of The Complete Guide to Grantmaking Basics.