From a nonchalant teenager to authoring a book on Verilog at 25 and launching successful IPOs for startups on the US stock market, Rajeev Madhavan exemplifies how the right guidance can transform a life. This is the story of one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists, as narrated to Yashasvini Razdan.
Growing up in Kochi, with a father who worked in Customs and a homemaker mother, Rajeev Madhavan was the youngest and only boy among three siblings. Pampered by everyone, young Rajeev’s dad, T.K. Madhava Panicker, was at the forefront of letting him prance and play cricket. However, his mother, Sathy Devi, was a tough taskmaster who ensured that none of her children slipped up on studies, maintaining a balance between pampering and control.
“My mother was a homemaker. She controlled the finances at home. If I wanted to go play cricket and buy gear, my dad would let me, but my mum would not. She turned her family home into an apartment complex, sold some apartments, and kept some for rentals. Her business acumen was impeccable, but she probably never realised it,” recalls Rajeev, with admiration and awe for his mother’s tight grip and financial foresight.
A comical business
Rajeev did not spend any time concerning himself with the family’s finances or anything his parents did. His dad always found a way to fulfil most of his wishes. His interests were limited to playing cricket, reading comic books, and overall mischief. “I managed to get decent grades, but I never really worked hard on my studies, mostly because I was more interested in playing cricket and running around,” he laughs.
His raging passion for cricket was quelled by his mother, who, like a strict disciplinarian, ensured that Rajeev stuck to studying and achieving decent grades. Recalling an incident that ended very badly, Rajeev chuckles, “I was on the school cricket team. Just a week before the exams, I was out playing cricket. When I got back, my mum took my cricket bat and set it ablaze, warning me to start studying. I was furious, but she was firm and made sure I studied.” The arson did not quell Rajeev’s love for cricket; he continued to play, and to this day, he makes it a point to watch India’s World Cup cricket matches live with his friends.
A brilliant public speaker at school, Rajeev’s mornings usually began in front of the microphone on the stage of Rajagiri High School, Kochi, delivering the morning school prayers at the Catholic school, and then standing in line to be punished for mischief right after.
Oblivious to his mother’s business dealings and prompted by necessity, Rajeev started a full-fledged business venture in the ninth grade. His love for comics and the lack of high-end Tintin and Asterix comics propelled him to start a comic rental service on his school bus every morning. “My dad had given me some money to buy Amar Chitra Katha comics, but I had to find a way to get expensive Tintin, Asterix, and other Western comics. I came up with the idea to rent out my Amar Chitra Katha comics to other kids on the bus,” he recounts.
Every morning, on the 45-minute bus ride, young Rajeev, along with two of his friends, ran this little operation. “We carried only a few textbooks in our big school bags; the rest were comics we rented out on the bus,” he grins mischievously.
Like any business, this too came with its share of problems. Being one of the smallest kids in the ninth grade—only about four feet nine inches (145cm) tall—some kids would skip paying back the money. Sharp as a button, Rajeev discloses his innovative solution to this grave problem: “I made a deal with the biggest guy in class. He was actually a nice guy, but the kids feared him because of his sheer size. Our deal allowed him to read the comics first and, in return, he would collect the money from the kids who had not paid me.”
The business venture ended in the first semester of the tenth grade when the school principal caught the kids collecting money on the bus, resulting in the suspension of Rajeev and his two co-founders from the school bus.
Back then, the concept of encouraging entrepreneurial skills was non-existent. Despite the public shame in school, Rajeev’s father supported him for starting an honest business venture to buy all his favourite comics. “The cash flow from renting out those comics allowed me to buy more books, read more, and earn more,” he says proudly.
Years later, the school invited him to give a talk about entrepreneurship. “I started my speech by narrating the story of how my first business was shut down by the school’s management,” he quips.
VLSI on the beach
After his failed business venture, young Rajeev returned to his studies and got into the best local college for his higher secondary education (pre-degree). Once settled, he resumed his carefree ways, resulting in slipping grades. It was only when one of his friends publicly shamed him that he would not qualify for engineering that Rajeev took it as a challenge to turn things around, working hard to gain admission in the National Institute of Technology, Suratkal, a beautiful engineering college with a beachside campus.
“I spent more time on the beach than in any classroom throughout the first three years of engineering,” he grins, revealing his trick for avoiding lectures. “My usual trick was to make so much noise in class or the lab that I would get thrown out, receive attendance, and then be left alone to study for the final exams.”
Rajeev’s antics would have continued had he not crossed paths with Dr P.S. Bhatt, who taught digital design at NIT Surathkal. He recognised Rajeev’s tricks and, instead of throwing him out, told him to go to the library and study. “He followed me to the library, which was a shock to me. After two or three days of this, I started studying the course. No wonder I ended up in digital design and VLSI!” he exclaims.
Rajeev attributes Dr Bhatt for guiding him at the right time and urging him to apply for a Master’s in North America. A PhD from the State University of New York (SUNY), Dr Bhatt suggested that Rajeev rewrite his last three semester exams along with the ongoing one all in one go to have a chance at scoring better. “I was the only person in the university who did that, and everyone thought I was crazy,” he laughs.
“If Dr Bhatt had not shown up in my life, I would probably be doing something else. I managed to catch up in the last two semesters, and Dr Bhatt wrote the most glowing reference letters I could have ever received, which opened the doors of several schools in the US and Canada, including the University of Michigan, McGill, and Queen’s University,” he narrates.
Rajeev eventually ended up going to Queen’s University, Ontario—not because it was his college of preference. Young and boisterous, Rajeev had developed unbridled passions for a junior in his college, Geetha. “She was a Canadian citizen and came to Surathkal as a foreign student. My father figured out my intention behind studying in Canada, and soon after we got engaged,” he smiles, recalling his vivacious youth.
The couple has two daughters—Meera and Maya. The older one, Meera, lives in London, pursuing her second Master’s in AI and Biomedical Sciences, while Maya lives with the family and works at Meta. “I went to meet Geetha with the unsuccessful intention to rag her, and since then, she has been ragging me! I live in a women’s hostel,” he jests and goes on to narrate his first meeting with Geetha.
“I called her out of her class—being a year senior—and took her for coffee in the college canteen. I could not rag her as her uncle was my father’s friend, but the warden of the men’s hostel suspended me because word had spread that I did rag her. I sent word to her through two of my friends who lived in the girl’s hostel to clarify that I did not rag her. She went to the principal, explained everything, and they lifted my suspension,” he narrates.
“She bailed me out once, and to this day, while I claim that I went to rag her once, she has ragged me forever. However, she claims she has been bailing me out ever since!” he jokes.
Fool’s day prankster to author
Rajeev cruised through Canada’s cold climate and, after graduation, was faced with two choices—a job at Bell Northern Research (BNR), a research subsidiary of Nortel, or working in a startup called Newbridge Microsystems, which employed very few people. Apprehensive about joining a startup that no one had ever heard of, Rajeev opted for the safer and more conventional choice and started working at BNR. He soon realised it was a mistake after his peers from college became successful within a few years of joining after the startup went public. “Even though I made the wrong choice in terms of financial success, BNR was a great place for research,” he says.
Even with immense potential and brilliance, Rajeev’s youthful exuberance continued at his new workplace. “I was a bit of a party animal, buying stereo systems with my money instead of focusing on work,” he recalls. For everyone else, he was just another guy working alongside the 10,000 other employees. However, a single prank on April Fool’s Day steered the course of his life in a direction that would make him the leader we know today.
It was only when his tough manager, Ed Vopni, guided him to utilise his potential that Rajeev started working towards excellence. “On April Fool’s Day, the new guy at BNR would get pranked. Out of the many pranks everyone played on me, one guy locked me out of my IBM mainframe account, raising the fear that I had been fired. For 15 minutes, I was sweating until they all shouted, ‘April Fool’s!’ and made fun of me,” narrates Rajeev.
Swearing to get back at them, Rajeev managed to knock out the UNIX accounts on the workstation for the pranksters. Within fifteen minutes, everyone realised what had happened, and he was called in by his manager, Ed Vopni, a tough guy who, in any other situation, would not have tolerated such behaviour. However, Vopni recognised Rajeev’s brilliance and told him to channel this tenacity into his actual work to succeed. “That conversation shook me out of a long deep slumber, and I realised that I needed to work harder to make something of myself,” he recalls.
Rajeev began taking every course that BNR offered, especially in VLSI. Within six months, he started working on various VLSI semiconductor chips and EDA software. “During a meeting, some potential partners offered an ASIC solution to BNR. I suggested moving away from schematic methods and using logic synthesis to launch the ASIC offerings,” he shares.
While everyone else on the team dismissed it as youthful idiosyncrasy, Vopni supported Rajeev’s idea. “That was the first time I felt validated by someone I respected,” Rajeev says. For young Rajeev, this small acknowledgement from a manager who had been tough on him gave him a glimpse into what hard work could bring. From that point on, there was no looking back.
“I thank my stars for coming across Prof. P.S. Bhatt and Ed Vopni, who guided me in the right direction. Vopni’s harsh truths opened my eyes. I advise all young managers to be truthful to their employees and let them know how they are performing,” he remarks.
Two years into working at BNR, at the age of 25, Rajeev authored a book on Verilog, which went on to become one of the pioneering textbooks on HDL-based logic design, synthesis, and verification.
California calling
Between work, supporting customers, and long hours, Rajeev battled the cold and harsh winters of Ottawa, trying to acclimatise himself to the chill, but to no avail. “My friends tried taking me skating on the Ottawa River several times, but I kept falling while kids skated circles around me,” he recalls, laughing it off.
In December 1990, Rajeev attended a conference in California to present a paper. “I loved California. The weather was fantastic, and I called my wife, telling her we should move there,” he narrates. On returning to Ottawa, Rajeev told his manager that he wanted to skip his yearly review as he planned to move to California. His manager, in turn, guided him down the correct route and suggested an assignment from BNR on a joint project with Cadence Design Systems. “He proposed sending me to California for a year and a half so I could decide if I really wanted to move permanently,” shares Rajeev.
Around the same time, Rajeev met a venture partner named Lucio Lanza from US Venture Partners, who was funding a company called Epic Design, a major success in chip design automation software. Lanza would discuss business plans with Rajeev due to his strong design background at BNR. The conversations with Lanza intrigued him, sowing the first seeds of pursuing a direction in startups.
Rajeev started working at Cadence as a BNR employee, specifying the needs of BNR for analogue design. He wrote a specification for a product for analogue HDL, which later became a product at Cadence. As he made the decision to move permanently to a California company, Cadence offered him a position to implement the analogue HDL. A year later, as the product was being launched, Rajeev was sent on a flight to Florida to present the product to Harris Semiconductor. On the way back, Jim Solomon, the founder of Cadence, invited Rajeev to sit next to him. After a few glasses of wine and some questions from Rajeev, Solomon revealed that if he had a second chance at doing things differently, he would have launched the analogue division of Cadence as a startup.
The conversation lit a spark in Rajeev, who realised that pursuing an idea as a startup was possible. He wanted to start his own company. The following week, he decided to work with Vinod Agarwal and formed LogicVision. Solomon tried to warn him against leaving his job, citing that the market for test automation was not very large then. “I had no idea about market size at that time. I was simply driven by the idea of starting something new,” reveals Rajeev.
Thus, once again driven by passion and vigour, Rajeev dove headfirst into another challenge. Back home, his mother was furious and could not understand why Rajeev would leave a job at BNR (more than 10,000 employees) for Cadence (800 employees at that time) and give up a good job and stable salary to become an entrepreneur and start a business!
With zero business sense and a singular focus on getting customers to use the software he had created, Rajeev and his co-founders managed to get Apple to use their product. Rajeev and his team spent their mornings working with Apple’s team and returned at night to write code. “My wife would bring food, and I would sleep on a pullout couch in the office. There were many days when I did not go home because I was so determined to get things done. This was where I built a work ethic and learnt that making the customer successful was the most important thing,” he shares.
After a year, Rajeev concluded that a startup needed to make money, which was becoming difficult at LogicVision. Two years later, he started Ambit Design Systems. The company was bought by Cadence for $280 million in under four years, putting him on the map and giving him the freedom to think about other ventures.
The successful exit also left Rajeev with a few life lessons. “I once walked away from a partner who was willing to fund us on a conditional basis, at a time when we did not have any money to pay salaries. I walked away from the deal without being able to explain my reasons to my team members and took a unilateral decision,” he shares.
Cautioning against this attitude, Rajeev elucidates, “This approach never works. Over the years, I got better at explaining my decisions. A startup is not an individual sport; it is a team sport.”
Immediately after Ambit, Rajeev jumped into Magma Design Automation as Founder, President, and CEO. By this time, Rajeev’s mother had given up reprimanding him and concluded that her son could not hold on to a job!
Magma’s software tools became known for their efficiency in facilitating low-power semiconductor designs without sacrificing performance, making it possible to build more power-efficient chips. The company’s approach allowed designers to make adjustments and corrections early in the process, reducing the risk of costly revisions later.
Magma provided core infrastructure software to semiconductor pioneers, such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Samsung, and enabled ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) service providers, such as Open-Silicon (co-founded by Naveed Sherwani and Dr Satya Gupta), to offer timing and area predictability for reliable, predictable chip designs, which in turn helped them scale their businesses. Magma and Open-Silicon signed one of the largest EDA deals in India, and Chitra Hariharan and her team in India taped-out more than 100 chips using the Magma EDA tools. Many of the technologies developed by Magma became industry standards.
One of the pioneering examples of innovation at Magma was the use of parallel threads, which allowed designers to run multiple simulations simultaneously, reducing the overall time required for verification, even for complex chip designs. Parallel processing became a key enabler for handling the increasing complexity of modern semiconductor designs, especially in advanced nodes, such as 28nm, 14nm, and beyond.
Magma was listed on Nasdaq in 2001. During the time between Ambit’s exit and Magma’s sale to Synopsys in 2012, Rajeev helped fund or form 28 companies as an entrepreneur-angel-investor.
Rajeev attributes his business sense and the desire to understand business to his mother.
“I do believe some people have a natural inclination for business—it is in their DNA. I probably have some of that business DNA from my mum. Negotiation and decision-making are learned skills, but the desire to understand business and how it works comes from within.”
His dad continued to encourage him. “He was always my biggest fan,” he says. Rajeev’s mother finally came around when a local Kochi newspaper wrote a story about Magma going public. “It was only when she read that news report that she concluded I had finally achieved something in life,” he jests.
The gardener never smells his roses!
Not many people know, but tough boss Rajeev is up at 5:30 AM every Saturday morning. Assisted by two gardeners, the founder of Clear Ventures can be seen working for the next three to five hours, forgetting his gloves, tending to his rose garden with around 3000 rose bushes! “It has become a very large private rose garden,” he claims proudly.
The garden, which is more than two decades old, sprouted into existence on a flight to Portland, Oregon, immediately after Magma went public. “I was going for an investor meeting. On the flight, I was sitting next to a man who was flipping through pictures of roses,” he narrates. Upon enquiring, the man revealed that he ran a rose nursery and invited Rajeev to visit. “I saw his roses and, impressed, I told him I would buy one of each variety. I thought he had maybe 20 varieties—turns out he had 400! And so, he shipped all 400 varieties to me,” he laughs.
Despite the hours and the effort, Rajeev doesn’t ever stop to smell the roses! “I just keep growing them and fixing issues as they come up. I focus on mending whatever needs attention, but I do not believe in staying there to marvel at their beauty. That is for others to do, while I move on to the next thing,” he shares.
Interestingly, Rajeev’s wife, Geetha, is allergic to roses and needs to take anti-allergy drugs to spend time in the garden. “She jokes that I maintain the garden just to keep her out of it! This garden is therapeutic for me. It keeps me grounded and gives me the break that I need,” he says.
Over time, Rajeev expanded the garden to include a greenhouse with papaya, mango, and other plants that remind him of his home in Kerala. “It is more than just a rose garden—it has become a bit of a Kerala greenhouse now!”
| Some Favourites of Rajeev |
| Favourite Food: Korean, Japanese, or Kerala Favourite Drink: Water Favourite Travel Destination: Norway Favourite Book: Art of War by Sun Tzu Favourite Sport: Cricket Real-Life Role Model: Virat Kohli or Sunil Gavaskar Real-Life Model as a VC: Mark Perry, NEA partner (Gentleman VC) |
From follower to leader, learner to guide
A leader is not born; a leader learns and leads. Rajeev too spent the next decade at Magma learning from his mistakes and striving to be the guide for his peers, just as Prof. P.S. Bhatt and Ed Vopni had been for him. The road was rocky, and the learning never seemed to end, but somehow Rajeev never took the same turn twice, thus avoiding going in circles, and moved on to the path of leadership.
“A leader needs to be tough and empathetic at the same time. I reached this level of thinking by the third startup,” he states.
At Magma, Rajeev built a strong internal team of engineers and experts who contributed to the company’s success and drove innovation in areas like physical synthesis, design for manufacturability, and sign-off tools. Young professionals hired by Rajeev are today working as C-suite executives, architects, and leaders at top technology firms in Silicon Valley.
Sharing his experiences, he recalls hiring Anirudh Devgan, the current President and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, who presented Rajeev with a startup idea. “I immediately realised he was very sharp and offered him a position at Magma. Within three months of joining, it was clear that he was exceptional, fair, and very data-driven, so I gave him a business to run, and eventually, he was managing half of Magma,” he narrates. “It is an honour to have had such a great team, and I am proud of all their accomplishments.”
Creating a legacy at Magma, Rajeev managed around 1500 to 2000 people in Silicon Valley. He emphasises fairness and believes that the job of a CEO is to get the best out of everyone. He adds, “You should measure people’s performance from day one. If there is exceptional talent, you must promote and elevate those individuals as quickly as possible. The success of these individuals in future endeavours reflects on the leader.”
During his time at Magma, Rajeev was fortunate to have Mark Perry from New Enterprise Associates, one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, as an investor and board member. “He was the best VC you could ever have—he would give me advice, was very refined, and helped me understand the financial aspects of business,” he reminisces, admitting that he “wanted to try venture capital because of him. I thought if I could be as polished a gentleman as he was with startup founders, I would have achieved something.”
Once Magma was acquired by Synopsys, Rajeev, who had been used to making his own decisions since the age of 25, left a week after the acquisition. “Once you are tuned to being part of active leadership, being in an authoritative position without any real power isn’t interesting,” he states.
He continued investing in more startup companies until around 2014-2015, when he partnered with Chris Rust to start a venture fund. “It took me about six months to make a decision and, finally in 2016, we formed Clear Ventures,” he narrates.
Clear Ventures has partnered with around 32 companies, most of which were early-stage startups. The venture firm has raised three funds, with many companies reaching significant milestones.
Rajeev shares the secret sauce for this success. “My approach is that of an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. A lot of VCs in Silicon Valley are professionals trained at Wharton, Stanford, or Harvard Business School, who then joined a VC fund. My view is more operational, allowing me to build a relationship with the founder and work closely with them right from the preliminary stages of startup growth,” he explains.
Inspired by his two early-stage mentors, Rajeev continues to be what Dr Bhatt and Ed Vopni were for him. A hard taskmaster and an enthusiastic cheerleader, Rajeev’s mentorship has been instrumental in changing the lives of many tech entrepreneurs who are bursting with ideas and need guidance towards the clearest path to success.
