From Engineering Leader to Venture Investor
Summary
This session covers the career journey of Sri Viswanath, General Partner at Coatue and previous CTO of Atlassian, from engineering leader to venture and the lessons he’s learned along the way. Sri will share stories of the pivotal learning moments from his early career navigating the transition from IC to executive leadership, and insights from leading across small and large scale companies. He will also discuss how he translated his experience as an engineering leader into a career as a venture investor - and what you can do now to prepare yourself for a successful transition into a career in investing.
Speakers
Sri Viswanath is a General Partner at Coatue, where he oversees private investments in enterprise software companies. Prior to joining Coatue, Sri served as Atlassian’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), where he oversaw Atlassian's cloud-native journey – assuming responsibility over the building and scaling of Atlassian's cloud platform. Before joining Atlassian, Sri was CTO and SVP of Engineering at Groupon, the VP of R&D for mobile computing at VMware, and SVP of Engineering at Ning – where he was instrumental in the company's acquisition by Glam. He also led development of several successful open-source and B2B products at Sun Microsystems. He has served on the Board of Directors for SendGrid, and Splunk. He has a number of patents and holds a M.S. in Management from Stanford University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University.
Cathy Polinsky is a technology executive with over 20 years of industry experience. She was most recently the CTO at Stitch Fix, an online personal shopping service. She joined in 2016 prior to the Stitch Fix IPO and led the Engineering, Product and IT organizations through rapid growth. Prior to Stitch Fix, Cathy led a variety of engineering organizations and initiatives at Salesforce. She also built robust, large-scale systems and led engineering teams at Oracle, Yahoo! and Amazon. She is currently a board director at Aetion, a real-world evidence healthcare tech company. Cathy graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in cs and is a member of the Swarthmore Board.
