Chuck Ganapathi, Senior Vice President of Products at Salesforce & Creator of Chatter, Joins Accel Partners as Entrepreneur-in-Residence

SILICON VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Accel Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital and growth equity firm, today announced the addition of former salesforce.com executive Chuck Ganapathi as Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Prior to joining Accel, Ganapathi served as Senior Vice President of Products for Chatter and Mobile at salesforce.com, leading the company's product development efforts in enterprise social networking.

"Facebook has changed how we connect and share with the people in our personal lives, but that change is still in its earliest days in our work lives," said Ganapathi.  "Chatter is just the beginning of what I believe will be a major transformation for business applications and a great opportunity for a new generation of innovators.  Accel Partners and I share a common vision of using social computing to make the workplace more open and connected."

As an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners, Ganapathi will evaluate and incubate new business opportunities created by the confluence of social and mobile technologies in the enterprise.  Accel Partners has been an early investor in leading social companies such as Facebook and Groupon, mobile companies such as Angry Birds (Rovio) and Admob, and enterprise software and cloud startups such as Cloudera, Couchbase, Fusion-io, Springsource, Atlassian, and others.

"Chuck is a rare kind of leader who combines product intuition, technical depth, marketing savvy and ability to execute," said Accel partner Kevin Efrusy. "As the early investors in consumer companies like Facebook and Groupon, as well as next-gen 'consumerization of enterprise' companies like Dropbox, Squarespace, and Zimbra, we share Chuck's belief that social and mobile technologies will lead to further transformation of the enterprise.  We are thrilled to be working with Chuck."

Ganapathi has a track record of building great products and starting up successful new businesses inside market leading companies.  He led one of the largest product development efforts in salesforce.com's history to build Chatter, the company's most successful product release ever.  During that time, Ganapathi championed and led the acquisition of two start-ups: Dimdim, a real-time collaboration platform, and GroupSwim, a community platform with semantic filtering technology.  He also integrated the acquired technology and teams from two file sharing and collaboration start-ups, Koral and SlideAware.

Prior to Chatter, he ran salesforce.com's flagship sales automation product, Sales Cloud, which constitutes the bulk of the company's $2 billion annual revenue run rate.  He joined salesforce.com in 2006 as Vice President of Product Marketing for CRM.  Previously, he spent 6 years at Siebel Systems, where he was the founding product manager of their first internet application and fastest growing product line, Siebel eChannel. He also ran the company's eCommerce and order management product line, which was formed through the acquisition of two product catalog and auction software startups, OnLink and OpenSite.

Ganapathi has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from PSG Tech in India, a master's in industrial engineering from Purdue University, and a master's in product design and an MBA from Stanford University.

About Accel Partners

Founded in 1983 Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies worldwide, many of which have defined their categories, including Admob, Atlassian, BBN, Brightcove, ComScore, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Groupon, Imperva, JBoss, Kayak, Macromedia, metroPCS, OPOWER, Polycom/PictureTel, Playfish, QlikTech, Quidsi (diapers.com), Real Networks, Responsys, Riverbed,  Rovio (Angry Birds), Veritas, Walmart.com, XenSource and Zimbra.  For more information, please visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com, or find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.

SOURCE Accel Partners