Priya Saiprasad joins Mayfield Fund to lead enterprise investing

Priya Saiprasad will join Mayfield Fund on May 14 after helping found M12, Microsoft's independent investment fund.Saiprasad told Business Insider that, because she lived in 12 countries when she was growing up and had to remake friends each time, she admires entrepreneurs that have to “create something out of nothing.”At M12, she led investments in Series A and Series B enterprise artificial intelligence and machine learning companies. She also launched the firm's first female founders competition to overcome the misperception of a lack of women in the enterprise tech space. Saiprasad is one of the youngest partners in Mayfield's 50-year history. She plans to continue investing in early stage enterprise startups in her new role.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.Priya Saiprasad is a millennial. She teaches hip hop dancing at her alma mater, University of California, Berkeley. She has a distaste for buzzwords, a love for math, and is a Yelp Elite member.She's also Mayfield Fund's newest partner.The 50-year-old Silicon Valley institution brought on 29-year-old Saiprasad to lead the firm's early-stage enterprise investments starting May 14. Before joining Mayfield, she was a founding team member at M12, Microsoft's independent investment fund, where she led Series A and Series B investments in startups that created artificial intelligence and machine learning products for industries that have historically shied away from tech. Read More: Many traditional VCs are hesitant to buy into cannabis startups, but these investors are taking the plungeIn a conversation with Business Insider, Saiprasad said she hopes to dispel the myth that women do not create enterprise tech companies. At M12, she launched the firm's female founder competition for women in enterprise tech, which received an overwhelming response.“It's just a personal passion of mine,” Saiprasad told Business Insider. “I just want women, and men, to have equal amount of access to capital and statistics show that that is not true today. So I want to do whatever is in my power and ability to be able to move that statistic to a more fair and equitable manner.”Math is a universal languageSaiprasad was born in Chennai on Indian's southeastern coast. Her father worked for an oil company, and the family moved between 12 countries before Saiprasad turned 12. With each move, Saiprasad said she learned a new language, attended a new school, and made new friends. “The only thing that was constant for me was math,” Saiprasad told Business Insider. “Math is kind of the same in every country. Math was something that always drove me and I've always been really analytical; numbers just come very naturally to me. That's been one constant in my life.”Saiprasad's father eventually accepted a job in the Bay Area, and the family settled into a routine. Her mother was a macroeconomist, and worked primarily from home while she and her sister were growing up.“Growing up in my household, the dinner table conversations were, well, you could either think of them as really riveting or really boring,” Saiprasad said. “I always just wanted to find out what makes successful companies successful and unsuccessful companies not achieve that same degree of success, and I thought maybe an undergraduate degree in business could help me further explore that.”Read More: Carta, the startup building a stock exchange for startups, says its own valuation increased nearly $1 billion in 5 monthsNot keen on another move, Saiprasad attending UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business with a minor in math. After graduating in 2010, she went into investment banking before landing at payments startup Square, ahead of her career at Microsoft's M12.Analyzing Silicon ValleyEarly enterprise tech startups struggle most with a clear path to profitability, Saiprasad told Business Insider. She is on the board of three enterprise software startups and believes an analytical approach to funding what she calls next-generation founders is key to bringing new ideas to the enterprise tech market.“I think it's very obvious, but first-time entrepreneurs bring a non-jaded perspective, and they bring that raw enthusiasm and scrappiness that really can help accelerate at the early stage,” Saiprasad said. “And that sort of glee that you see in those first time entrepreneurs, especially the younger generation of entrepreneurs, is fantastic.”According to Crunchbase, Mayfield counts 116 exits in its 50-year history, a majority of which were enterprise startups. As Saiprasad looks to join the team, she thinks her approach will help the firm continue its successful streak.“I think, as a younger VC, there's a lot of perceptions that [other investors] have about Millennials,” Saiprasad told Business Insider. “I don't think [Millennials want] entitlement, I think we want equity and fairness. It's actually a positive where we will fight so hard for our entrepreneurs to have fairness in every stage of the process.”Saiprasad is planning to focus on startups working in “underhyped” industries that have not traditionally embraced technological innovation, such as real estate, construction, manufacturing, and legal technology. “It's not necessarily the most exciting spaces but there's actually so much innovation over there because there's a data moat that exists,” Saiprasad said. “Whenever there's a data moat, there's so much opportunity to optimize and build an optimization engine on top of it.”