Finding the next Facebook

Katrina Brooker meets the tech investors with the Midas touch

ONE sunny day in March, Gagan Biyani, the young and hugely ambitious CEO of Sprig — a company so new you probably have never heard of it — stepped into the main conference room at 2550 Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. Here, inside this nondescript Silicon Valley office, everything was about to change for Biyani, and his small company. He was here to pitch his business plan to Greylock Partners.

The room is ordinary — a white board, table, some chairs — but through the eyes of a fledgling CEO, it becomes transformed. “Coming in, the first person I see is Reid, right?... And then David is over here; Aneel is there,” Biyani says breathlessly. “It was the biggest moment of my life.”