VC Salil Deshpande on jump to Bain, which startups excite him

Salil Deshpande made it onto Forbes' annual Midas List of top venture investors this year and jumped from Bay Partners to Bain Capital Ventures.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Salil Deshpande focuses mostly on investing in startups developing software that end users are unaware of.
The companies he is interested in enable the servers and software that are behind popular business applications. They are usually building their offerings on open source platforms.
Deshpande has applied that narrow focus at two firms, beginning in 2006 at Bay Partners and joining Bain Capital Ventures’ Palo Alto office this spring.
His track record at Bay landed him at No. 71 on this year’s Midas List, his first appearance on Forbes’ annual ranking of the top VCs. He made the list on the strength of several big exits, including social business software developer Buddy Media (bought for $745 million by Salesforce) and Java application infrastructure developer SpringSource (bought by VMware for $420 million).
He talked to me about his move to Bain and the types of startups that interest him in a recent conversation, excerpted here.
Why did you make the switch from Bay, where you had success, to Bain?
It’s a great platform and I have known members of the team here for ages. When Ben Nye — one of the co-leaders of the ventures group — was running a company called Precise, he bought the second company that I started (The New Customware which became The Middleware Co.). That’s when I first got to know him. That was in 2001.
I also co-invested with this team while I was at Bay. One of the investments we did together was Dynatrace (application lifecycle management). And another one was ZeroTurnaround (Java development software).
I have always thought of Bain as a Boston firm, but there is a healthy presence in Silicon Valley, right?