Summary: (http://kamlashow.com/podcast/wp-content/uploads/NEA_KittuKolluri-150x150.jpg)Kittu Kolluri (http://www.nea.com/team/krishna-kittu-kolluri)is a general partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) in Menlo Park. A couple of weeks ago one of the startups he invested in was acquired by Monsanto for $1 billion (http://www.nea.com/blog/big-deal-for-big-data-climate-corp). This is one of the biggest acquisitions for NEA. This was also one of the biggest acquisitions in the big data space. That startup was Climate Corporation (http://www.climate.com) founded by David Friedberg (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2789) and Siraj Khaliq (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/big-data-in-the-dirt-and-the-cloud/?_r=0), who previously worked at Google. Kittu invested in the seed round of the startup, which was originally called WeatherBill. Later on Climate Corporation went on to raise multiple rounds of funding from other investors. In this interview Kittu shares his journey and the transition he made from an engineer/entrepreneur to a venture capitalist. How does he work with entrepreneurs and what draws him to invest in a startup? And how do companies work with their original business plan? Or, do they pivot? One of the examples Kittu shares is how Climate Corporation's original focus was in a different market and how they shifted their focus to the agriculture space using big data. This interview was originally recorded (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOcpYZuprG4)for TV. Kittu joined NEA in 2006 after spending time on the other side of the negotiating table as an entrepreneur and engineer. He was the CEO of Netoteris that was acquired by Netscreen, which was then acquired by Juniper Networks. Prior to that he was co-founder of Healtheon that was acquired by WebMD. He began his engineering career at SGI as an engineer. You can listen to previous interviews with Kittu where he talks about how he became an engineer and entrepreneur and what does failure and success mean to him. Here are the links to Part-1 (http://kamlashow.com/podcast/2009/11/24/neas-kittu-kolluri-part-2/)and Part-2 (http://kamlashow.com/podcast/2009/11/24/neas-kittu-kolluri-part-2-2/)of the audio interview. Photo courtesy of NEA
