Divyahans Gupta

My full name, Divyahans, means “divine swan” in Hindi.
My uncle chose it because I looked terribly pale when I was born.
As far as I know, I’m the only person in the world with that name.
I wear it on my sleeve everyday.
You can call me Divya.
I was born in a city near the heart of India called Bhopal.
My father started his career there as a sales engineer for Cisco Systems, a Sequoia company.
His 20-year career at Cisco steered my family from Bhopal to Cary, North Carolina, and from Cary to San Jose, California, where my mother started her small business on a Square card reader.
I like to say that Sequoia helped bring me from the other side of the world and into their office.
My sister introduced me to computer science in eighth grade.
I fell in love with building things and realized that it was the closest thing I had to a superpower.
My time at Stanford was devoted to exploring every aspect of the field, from systems to machine learning, graphics and more.
After graduation, I put my degree to use building infrastructure at Airbnb and machine learning products at Databricks.
Coming from sales and marketing, my father reminds me to never underestimate the power of storytelling in business.
The simple reason being that companies are ultimately run by people, not technology.
I think it’s my love for both that drew me to venture.