Rehan Jalil is a venture advisor to Mayfield Fund, a 42 year old venture capitalist firm. With $2.7 billion investment fund, Mayfield invests primarily in early-stage companies in the Enterprise, Consumer, Energytech, Mobile/Telecom, and Semiconductor sectors. The firm fosters global entrepreneurship by investing in India-based companies through its Mayfield India fund and directly in China-based companies. The firm, till date, has invested in more than 500 companies, resulting in over 100 IPOs and more than 100 mergers or acquisitions.

At Mayfield, Jalil contributes to social entrepreneurship projects, is on the board of OPEN and Koshish and is a charter member of TiE.

Trends driving Investment

On the infrastructure side, new opportunities are created by hybrid enterprise and cloud networks, over the top networking, software defined networking, efficient content delivery needs, faster and optimal storage needs, big data analysis needs, security needs and internet-of-things.

As Mobile will be the predominant way of accessing internet globally, new opportunities continue to arise on how to use the connectivity, location, camera and sensors to change the way we currently live, work and do commerce. Use of voice and NLP as a user interface is taking off towards mass consumption. Innovations are needed to increase the utilization of the under utilized personal or corporate assets.