Shreya Shekhar, M.E.T. 23, on her journey from AI-obsessed kid to top-tier VC partner

Born and raised in San Jose, Shreya Shekhar, M.E.T. 23 (BS electrical engineering and computer sciences, BS business administration), grew up steeped in tech. Most of the neighborhood parents, including hers, worked in the industry, and most kids she knew growing up started coding young. 

In this interview, Shekhar, described as both a “humble” and “fantastic human” by M.E.T. program directors, discussed her early interest in artificial intelligence, highlights of the undergraduate Management Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) program, and her rise to become a 23-year-old partner at Greylock, a top-tier VC firm known for its early investments in companies like Airbnb, Meta, Palo Alto Networks, Figma, and more. At Greylock, she’s working on early-stage deals in AI infrastructure, including databases, development tools, and cybersecurity. 

When did you become interested in startups?

The first time I became interested in startups was probably at BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Upper School. I read this book called Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and wrote an essay on it for AP Lang because I found AI so fascinating. I also started reading about OpenAI. In 2015, many amazing researchers and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Stuart Russel had put out an open letter against autonomous weapons that used artificial intelligence. At 16, I signed that letter and thought, ‘One day, maybe this name will mean something here.’ This was a big turning point for humanity that brought about notions of either existential risk or changing the way that we exist in our reality on a day-to-day basis. I was fascinated by that kind of existential question, and I wanted to dive deeper into AI.

Since then, you’ve studied the use of AI within different fields like bioinformatics and genomics, while also learning about AI in software development. Do you have any fears about AI?

At the end of the essay that I wrote in high school, I said something like, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ So I was arguing for a cyborg-esque future, where humans and AI join forces in some ways so that we would live in a more symbiotic way instead of AI ‘destroying humanity’ and that alternate dystopian reality that folks warn against. I would say that I am an optimist but also in some ways a realist because I don’t think that we can forever coexist as separate entities and both have our own place in society.

You worked at scientific research labs at Stanford as a high school student and have a deep science and engineering background. When did you become interested in business?

By the end of high school, I decided that I wanted to be a founder one day. I was reading a lot about Elon Musk and his ventures like SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Tesla. I was also obsessed with Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. She was a big idol for me. One of my computer science teachers recommended me for an award because I had started an initiative to teach the younger students at my school to code, and Sheryl Sandberg presented the award to me in a ceremony. Learning about her journey, I started to care a lot about women’s career journeys and being a female founder, along with creating more representation for women in technology.

Let’s talk a bit about M.E.T. What were some highlights of the dual degree program?

The amount of attention that they paid to us as students was amazing, including the unique resources that we had, like 1:1 career counseling, internship opportunities, and having Mr. Grimes (M.E.T.’s founding donor, Michael Grimes, now a senior official at the U.S. Department of Commerce) as an advisor to us. I remember when I got four internship offers, I was confused about what to do, and I emailed Mr. Grimes and asked for advice. He sent me a 2,000-word email telling me how I should analyze each one, how I should break down the market and the team to understand the potential of the companies. We went back and forth as he helped me reason it through. At the end, I ended up taking three out of the four internship offers, working as a software engineer intern at Rockset, Glean, and Abnormal Security during my last year of college.

How did entrepreneurship come into play in the M.E.T. program?

The minute that I started at Berkeley, I met co-founders who I tried to start a company with during my freshman and sophomore years in the program. Rhonda Shrader (executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program) was extremely helpful to us when we were starting with the UC Launch Accelerator program, helping us ideate almost weekly when we were pivoting from our first startup idea to the second one, called Good Neighbor. 

What did Good Neighbor do?

During COVID, we realized that it was hard for people to access quality meals for cheap, and restaurants were losing business. So when we returned to campus, we built Good Neighbor, a preorder-based food delivery system, partnering with restaurants that were struggling. We took batch orders the night before, and the restaurants were able to give us a discount that we passed on to students. We did everything from facilitating partnerships to creating the website to making the deliveries every day on campus—and we had a lot of scrappy social marketing, like pictures of professors holding a Good Neighbor bag. We learned how to take something from zero to one. But after a year and a half or so of working together, we realized this was not the idea we wanted to drop out of Berkeley for. We parted ways in 2021. But that was what gave all of us a love for startups. I would also say that the Accel Scholars program at Berkeley, run by Accel partner Amit Kumar, was an amazing opportunity to learn about startups and entrepreneurship directly from such an accomplished investor and amazing mentor. 

How did you connect with Greylock while at Haas?

I found all of my startup internships at Berkeley through the Greylock Techfair for early-career engineers and ended up interning at two Greylock startups. Through this, I formed a relationship with the head of university talent at Greylock. During the year that I was working at those startups, she would call and ask me how things were going, if I was looking for something different, or if I was thinking about full time. Ultimately, I told her that I wanted to go somewhere a lot smaller. All the startups I worked at had almost 100 people, and I felt like I couldn’t have the kind of agency and ownership that I was looking for. I had also been tracking Greylock partner Asheem Chandna’s security investments and really wanted to work for one of his companies. She told me about a few of their stealth portfolio companies, and I chose to go to Bedrock Data, a data security and management company, as a founding engineer at the beginning of 2023. 

How did you transition from your role as a founding engineer at Bedrock to becoming a VC?

I ended up in VC through a circuitous route. I was at Bedrock for about two-and-a-half years formally as an engineer, but also wearing all these different hats. Somewhere along the way, I started meeting people within the startup ecosystem in San Francisco—a lot of people who were starting companies, and a lot of my friends were also starting companies. So I started to angel invest. I also did a female founders program that Pear VC offered. One of my friends started an AI and security startup, and I was ideating with them until they got funding, helping them out on anything that I learned from my time at Bedrock. I ended up putting a check into their company and into Mercor as well. Then, I started to write articles about AI automation in security, agent orchestration, and various systems problems we needed to solve to build reliable agents at scale. Based on inbound, I spoke with a few venture firms. But at the end of the day, given how Greylock incubates companies and how much they support their startups—whether in recruiting customers or helping them narrow down their ideal customer persona, things like that—I felt that this was the only place where I would be able to get that operator feel on the venture side because they were so involved with founders. 

How’s life as a VC going so far? Are friends coming out of the woodwork to pitch you?

I’ve been at Greylock for three months. So far, I’ve worked on one of our investments, which hasn’t yet been announced. One thing about the structure of the firm is that we do very few high-conviction investments per year, so each partner is very involved with the startups. Venture is such a long horizon game, and I’m only getting started. It takes a really long time to build experience and to actually develop good intuition and be able to properly assess and help companies. The hill is yet to be climbed. There’s a lot to be done—and I’m definitely excited.