That insight became his investment thesis. While Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz were chasing growth-at-all-costs, Raghuvanshi began writing small checks to “boring” infrastructure companies: supply chain logistics, industrial IoT, and B2B compliance software. In 2010, he launched Equanimity Ventures with $47 million from a handful of wealthy Indian families and ex-Sun colleagues. His first fund was considered embarrassingly conservative. He passed on Uber (“unregulated taxi service with a legal time bomb”), passed on Snapchat (“ephemeral messaging for teenagers is not a moat”), and passed on WeWork (“they sell office space wrapped in a cult”).
When asked what he hopes his epitaph will be, he pauses. The cafe hums with startup founders frantically pitching on Zoom calls. bs raghuvanshi
He mentors a small group of young founders, mostly first-generation immigrants. One of them, Priya Mehta, founder of supply chain startup , says: “B.S. asked me a question no other investor did: ‘What will your company do when the market turns against you for five years?’ Everyone else asked about TAM [total addressable market] and traction. He asked about character.” The Legacy Question At 58, Raghuvanshi is beginning to wind down. He’s raised a final, $300 million fund—small by today’s standards—and plans to retire by 2030. He is writing a book, tentatively titled The Tortoise Manifesto . That insight became his investment thesis
His first job was at Sun Microsystems, writing firmware for SPARCstations. By 1996, he had co-founded a networking startup called . It failed spectacularly in the dot-com crash of 2001. His first fund was considered embarrassingly conservative
In an ecosystem drunk on hyperbole—where twenty-two-year-olds in hoodies claim to be “disrupting the fabric of reality” before they’ve filed incorporation papers—B. S. Raghuvanshi is an anomaly. He doesn’t tweet. He doesn’t podcast. He has never posed with a hoodie pulled over a baseball cap. Instead, the 58-year-old managing partner of Equanimity Ventures wears pressed linen shirts, speaks in complete paragraphs, and has quietly delivered a 34% internal rate of return (IRR) over fifteen years.
“I lost everything—my savings, my marriage, my belief that hard work guaranteed anything,” he told me over coffee in Palo Alto. “But I gained the only thing that matters: the realization that most people in tech are solving the wrong problem. They optimize for speed. They should optimize for survival .”