Navin Chaddha grew up in India, graduated from IIT Delhi, and began a PhD at Stanford before walking away to found VXtreme, a streaming media platform later acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media. He went on to found two more companies - iBeam Broadcasting, which he took public on Nasdaq, and Rivio, later merged with CPA.com - before joining Mayfield as Managing Partner in 2006. He has since backed more than 60 companies, 18 of which have gone public and 29 of which have been acquired, including Lyft, HashiCorp, and Poshmark, and has been named to the Forbes Midas List eighteen times, ranking in the Top Five in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Chaddha has led Mayfield's growth to $3 billion in assets under management, built around what he calls a 'people first' philosophy - backing founders primarily at the inception stage, before the broader market believes in them.