Insight MD Nikhil Sachdev on Building Global Software & Fintech Giants

Nikhil Sachdev joined Insight Partners in 2020 as a Managing Director. In his role, he works with companies in the software and fintech ecosystems starting at Series A and well beyond. He invests through a global lens, partnering with founders close to his homebase in California and stretching across the US into Europe, India, SE Asia and Latin America. He began his career advising technology companies at Goldman Sachs, where he was an investment banker focused on cloud and mobile. His start in the investing world came at private equity firm Bain Capital, where we took an operational lens to investing and partnering with companies. He developed a passion for how businesses can play a positive role in helping better the world. This passion led him to Harvard Business School, where he had a chance to spend his summer working with the founder of a Sequoia-backed startup, which sparked his interest in technology and inspired him to pursue a career in venture capital. After HBS, he joined Altimeter Capital, a long/short equity hedge fund that was scaling a venture capital practice. As a Partner at the firm, he led investments in multiple venture and growth stage private companies across the SaaS, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, Internet marketplace, gaming, and social media categories. At Insight, he has the privilege of working with founders and teams who imagine how technology can better the world and are actively building category-defining and enduring businesses. Silicon Valley is his home although he is traveling often. Topics:

• Key metrics to evaluate AI companies versus traditional SaaS
• The moats and defensibility of different AI companies
• Key patterns across successful AI companies