Chuck Ganapathi has joined Accel Partners as entrepreneur-in-residence, Reuters reported. Ganapathi is known for building Chatter, Salesforce.com’s social media service for the enterprise. He left Salesforce last month, and will work at Accel on a start-up idea in the field of business and social media, Reuters said.
(Reuters) – Accel Partners said it selected Chuck Ganapathi, who built Salesforce.com’s (CRM.N) popular Chatter software, as its latest entrepreneur-in-residence.
Ganapathi said he hopes the position will help him come up with a start-up idea in the field of business and social media. He has a proven track record in that area with Chatter, which is Salesforce.com’s year-old social-media service for enterprise.
“Picking the starting point requires a fair amount of research with business and with customers,” he told Reuters on Monday, adding that tapping into Accel’s network of companies will help him develop his ideas.
He said he left Salesforce.com last month.
The position also brings Ganapathi back into the orbit of Accel partner Kevin Efrusy. The two were in the same business school class at Stanford University.
Hiring enterpreneurs-in-residence is a common practice in Silicon Valley, where venture capital firms see it as a way to foster the next big start-up.
Bringing Ganapathi into the fold underscores Accel’s commitment to enterprise computing and the social Internet. The firm’s existing investments in that area include business file sharing company Dropbox and social recruiting company BranchOut.
Accel is one of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture capital firms, with investments ranging from social-networking site Facebook and daily-deals site Groupon.
In the past quarter, it closed on $1.35 billion in new capital in the U.S. (Reporting by Sarah McBride; editing by Carol Bishopric)
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