Sandhya Hegde
General Partner
Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in AI and enterprise SaaS companies. She loves working with technical founders who care deeply about design and data. She aims to partner closely with CEOs to build generational businesses that raise the bar for customer and employee experience.
Prior to Unusual, she was an early employee and executive at Amplitude, leading pivotal efforts across product development, category creation, fundraising and GTM strategy. As the EVP of Marketing & Growth, she helped establish Amplitude as a category leader in product analytics and the digital optimization space, overseeing 50x growth in its ARR. While at Amplitude, Sandhya also founded Amplify, the world's leading product-led growth (PLG) conference and served as a product strategy advisor to leading startups and Fortune 100 businesses including NBC, T-Mobile and Ford.
Before Amplitude, Sandhya was an investor at Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital, where she focused on emerging market startups in SaaS and Cleantech. Sandhya holds dual masters degrees in Business from Stanford GSB and Engineering from IIT Bombay, where she also completed her undergraduate education. You can reach her at sandhya@unusual.vc
Why Unusual?
Unusual stands out in the crowded landscape of new VC funds for its values and approach to supporting founders. When Unusual leads an investment, it deploys a founder engagement model of staggering depth. This is embodied by our Founder Services Team — expert operators from companies like Okta, MongoDB, New Relic and Segment who join technical founders near full-time for 3-6 months and kickstart their company with recruiting, sales and marketing support. This will become the new standard for all early stage investing in the next decade and I am excited to join the team leading the charge.
Q&A with
Sandhya Hegde
Experienced VCs will tell you that the market always wins. When I am making an investment I start with deep research into a strong market tailwind that presents a massive company-building opportunity. The teams I bet on have founder-market fit. Not only are they brilliant and passionate but deeply authentic to the problem they want to solve. They are great storytellers, magnets for talent and care deeply about both customer and employee experience.
Do as much diligence on your investors as they do on you. It is an incredible time to be a founder. Starting a company and raising funding has never been easier. If you are working on the right problems, you will find it that getting funded is easy but everything else is harder than ever before - hiring a great team, standing out from your competitors and building operational excellence as a team continue to be challenging. Pick investors who have experience building and scaling companies that you respect. Pick lead partners (and funds) who care deeply about you as early stage founders and will make supporting you their #1 priority.
From our founders
Sandhya—our Unusual partner and a proven operator by background—has an incredible amount of specific knowledge in our domain, which has already helped us avoid a few pitfalls.
Alex Bilmes
Co-Founder & CEO
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