In the penultimate series of TV sitcom Silicon Valley, chastened startup geek Richard Hendricks pivots his troubled company Pied Piper to focus on inventing a new, decentralised internet. The fictional company even dedicates a section of its website explaining its mission to rid the Web of “a slew of unwanted side effects – fake news, data collection, and constant surveillance to name a few”.
I thought of Hendricks’ audacious plan when talking recently to Anshu Sharma, CEO of Skyflow, a Silicon Valley startup about his plan to fix a similar area for the internet and Web in the shape of privacy.
Sharma has an interesting CV. Educated in the Bengali city of Kharagpur, India, he came to the US to take a Masters in Computer Science before joining Oracle for nine years, initially hacking code and rising to group product manager for SaaS before leaving for Salesforce in 2008 to become VP of product management. In 2014, he learned new tricks as a partner at Storm Ventures funding enterprise SaaS newcomers.