Salesforce.com's Chuck Ganapathi joins Accel Partners

Ganapathi said in an interview with VentureBeat Monday evening that he’ll seek to build a company in other words both “mobile” and “social” at its core, adding that the collision between those two is the most exciting trend happening for enterprise companies right now. We’re in the midst of one of the most exciting times of research transformation, he said.

While the last decade saw a fundamental shift in cloud computing, with Salesforce.com very much a trendsetter because it delivered its service over the Web, research recently has been only incremental, Ganapathi explained. He said he foresees another fundamental shift now happening in enterprise: “We’re seeing a step function now in social and mobile…we’re going to see the at once Salesforce.com.”

Entrepreneur in Residence

As an Entrepreneur in Residence, he is tasked to think up a promising business idea, with the expectation that Accel Partners will at that time fund the idea to allow im to build it into a company. At Salesforce, he was senior vice president of products for Chatter and Mobile.

Facebook and other social networking technologies let people connect in their personal lives, nevertheless it’s “for all that early days” when it comes to connecting and sharing with people in their work lives, he said. True, Chatter, the social collaboration tool within Yammer that Ganapathi built — he took it from a team of three people, to about 200 people — became one of the company’s most successful product launches. And it’s an early example of helping people collaborate in the workplace. Companies like Yammer and Jive are competitors. Yet it nevertheless feels like the very beginning, Ganapathi said.

He said the current era — with all the possibility it affords — reminds him of the heyday of the Internet 1.0, circa 1997, when he was back in business school. In actual fact, there, at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, is where he met Kevin Efrusy, who is now a prominent partner at Accel, and is widely credited for having sourced the Facebook deal for the firm. That’s where he as well met Ping Li, another Accel partner active in cloud investing. So once Chatter had been successfully launched, and Ganapathi began to look for his straightway move, his “first call was to to Kevin,” he said. Accel was the firm that backed Facebook, and is as a rule considered to be one of the handful of top-tier venture firms.

During that sting at Salesforce.com, Ganapathi championed and led the acquisition of two start-ups: Dimdim, a real-time collaboration platform, and GroupSwim, a community platform with semantic filtering innovation. He as well integrated the acquired innovation and teams from two file sharing and collaboration start-ups, Koral and SlideAware.