Overview

Gender

male

Suneet Wadhwa is a lifetime consumer entrepreneur in Web1 and Web2 and more recently is a Web3 investor. He has raised over $50M in venture capital and exited three companies: as co-founder of Snapfish (acquired by HP for $300M) and Engage (acquired by Spark Networks), and as a participant in one startup-to-IPO (Excite@Home). He is currently a Web3 investor for RippleX, the crypto BU of Ripple. Suneet’s Web3 investment experience spans nearly four years, during which time he and his team deployed $78M in 38 crypto projects, generating an MOIC of 4.2 and an IRR of 77%.

His operational experience covers the entire life-cycle of building and scaling companies: he started as employee #1 at both Snapfish and Engage, led and mentored a global fintech team (PayPal), and has executed +100 deals and investments across his career. Suneet is a natural negotiator and has developed and closed first-of-a-kind deals for companies that create new categories and business models.

In 1996 Suneet joined @Home as employee #60. @Home later went public at a valuation of $35B. As Director of Business Development, Suneet established alliances with some of the world’s leading media companies. He also co-led acquisitions for Narrative Communications, iMall, and Blue Mountain Arts, and orchestrated @Home’s acquisition of Excite for $6.7B. This was the biggest merger ever recorded for two Internet companies.

Suneet’s Web1 work began as the product visionary and co-founder of Snapfish.com, a disruptive photo sharing and printing service that HP acquired in 2005 for $300 million. Serving as its Vice President of Business Development, he co-led fundraising efforts for its Series A and Series B rounds, raising $43million in venture capital. In addition, Suneet closed investment deals from Kodak, Compaq, and others. The early innovations of Snapfish won the company the “Internet’s Rising Star” and “Most Innovative Business Model” awards.

In 2005 Suneet moved to Web2 work and co-founded Engage Corp, the world’s first social dating application, and served as its CEO. As the product visionary behind Engage, he was deeply involved in directing product and development efforts, and he co-invented several patents, paving the road for today’s social dating services. Under Suneet’s leadership, the company raised $8m in debt and equity while growing to over 800,000 members before being acquired by Spark Networks in 2008 (Amex: LOV).

Suneet served as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Foundation Capital before leading PayPal’s Consumer Wallet Growth team in 2013, which included an overhaul of the global onboarding experiences that resulted in a 15% YoY increase in the organic growth rate of PayPal’s customer base. His work was highlighted as one of the most successful product initiatives at PayPal for that year.

Later, Suneet took global responsibility for PayPal’s P2P product experience (the most popular in the world), leading and mentoring a team responsible for processing over $20B+ across 190+ countries, with over $500m in annual revenue. Suneet owned the end-to-end product and user experience across mobile and web.

Other entrepreneurial experience includes:
an attempt to create, from scratch, India’s first national cricket league (the “NCL”);
consultant to the CEO of a new, two-sided transactional (category-creating) marketplace in the $500B rental housing market (HomeSuite, now 2nd Address); and
consultant to CEOs of Offermatic (payments company backed by KPCB) and Bigdeal (auction platform backed by the Mayfield Foundation and First Round Capital) in business development, go-to-market, and fundraising.

Born in New York and raised in Minnesota and Arizona, Suneet attended University High School in Tucson, a public school for the academically gifted and talented (ranked 18th best secondary school in the US). He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona (recipient of an Arizona Board of Regents scholarship for outstanding academic achievements). He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.