sandhya hegde

Sandhya is an engineer at heart and investor by accident. She studied Electrical Engineering and Microelectronics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, graduating in 2007. At IITB, she spent her time programming robots and designing an analog chip for supercomputing on a diet consisting exclusively of noodles and fruit. Her passion for good engineering inspired her to try and commercialize complex technologies in energy efficiency.

With deep rural roots in Honnavar, India, Sandhya worked briefly as a consultant for McKinsey & Company’s rural clients in public health, rural banking, education technologies and telecom. This was her first brush with powerful market forces driving socioeconomic change. She came away inspired by the potential and the challenges of entrepreneurial ventures addressing tough problems in frontier markets.

In 2009, Sandhya joined Sequoia Capital India, which managed $1.8 Bn in funds for venture, growth and public investments. Over the next few years, she helped the team invest in financial services, enterprise software, healthcare and lead new categories like education management. Additionally, she set an example at the fund by incubating a new company and assisting entrepreneurs in fundraising and building business processes. She later joined Sequoia Capital Global Equities, US to help grow their developing market investment portfolio.

In 2011, Sandhya took a brief hiatus from work to join the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In her spare time, she developed an iOS app eerily similar to Path <:)> and moonlighted as a product manager for mobile health startup HealthTap to learn how to build and grow platforms with network effects. Around this time, she met Vinod Khosla and Mark Straub who were setting up Khosla Impact and decided to get in on a fabulous idea. At Khosla Impact, Sandhya looks for great tech startups in energy, education, livelihoods, logistics, healthcare and SME services.

While not traveling for work, Sandhya loves to travel for pleasure with her DSLR, read voraciously, attempt to improve on her Spanish, paint a little and learn new forms of dance.