Sillicon Valley lost a valuable asset in the shape of Rajeev Motwani

Tragic news spread all over Sillicon Valley. Rajeev Motwani, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor and the Stanford professor perhaps best known for serving as the adviser for Larry Page and Sergey Brin during the formative years of Google, has passed away.

Rajeev was an ardent supporter of Silicon Valley startups, investing and mentoring many of them while continuing his research at Stanford University. With investments in companies that included PayPal and Google, he saw an overwhelming amount of success. And through it all he continued to give back to the community though his mentorship, investments, and his time at Stanford, where he continued to teach as recently as last semester.

He was:

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Database Group/InfoLab, and Foundations Group
Computer Science Department
Stanford University

Ph.D. 1988 (Computer Science, U.C. Berkeley)
B.Tech. 1983 (Computer Science, IIT Kanpur)

Ron Conway, a long time friend of Motwani, was visibly shaken.


I never knew Rajeev Sahab, never met him but it seems he was the GURU / pioneer in Technology world, sympathies go out to Rajeev’s family.