Q&A: New Bessemer VP on links between online dating, VC investing

Sunil Nagaraj, a new vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners in Menlo Park, founded an online dating startup while at Harvard.

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

Bessemer Venture Partners on Thursday promoted two of its associates to vice president, a rung below being full partners in the firm: Aviad Ariel in Israel and Sunil Nagaraj here in Silicon Valley.

Nagaraj spoke to me about why he made the jump from running an online dating startup he launched at Harvard to helping to investing in new companies at Bessemer.
Turns out, he believes, there are some strong connections between the two.

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The following is an excerpted Q&A from our conversation.
What is your focus at Bessemer? What you have been doing since you joined the firm?
My background is as a computer scientist and programmer. So I've been doing more technical investments since I have been at Bessemer. The investments that I have led include Mind Pirate just recently in December, which is a new next generation mobile gaming company that's also going to build games for Google Glass and other wearable computing platforms.
I led our investment in Nitrous.IO, which is a new company that helps developers write code in the cloud with every other service and piece of software and use case, moving from the desktop to the cloud.
And then Zapier , which is another technical play. Zapier is a tool that helps you automate your dirty work. You can actually string together different services on the Web and have them automatically trigger each other. This helps business users and consumers automate certain parts of their lives. For example, I could ask Zapier to automatically create a new contact in the Salesforce whenever I receive a ticket on my bug ticketing system. So you can string these different services together.