Santosh Sankar is a Co-founder & Managing Partner of Dynamo Ventures. Prior to Dynamo, Santosh spent time on Wall Street both in investment banking and equity research.
Santosh started his first company, Razor Studios when he was 13 years old which provided IT support to small businesses in his hometown in Maryland. His most recent business was a bootstrapped financial media publication he co-founded and sold in college. He got his first taste of fund management when he oversaw approximately $1M of technology investments through the Great Recession for the Nittany Lion Fund, outperforming his benchmark by 6.37%.
Santosh loves the outdoors and serves as Trustee at Reflection Riding Nature Center. He’s also an active Board Member at The Company Lab, which promotes entrepreneurship in the greater Chattanooga region. Santosh calls the hills of Chattanooga home with his wife, three children, and rambunctious golden retrievers, Barley and Rye.
There’s a Sanskrit quote that roughly translates to “The journey is more beautiful than the destination.” While that’s important to revisit and remember as leaders and problem solvers, I’m less convinced as a road warrior and family man.
I can’t wait for teleportation to become a reality. I will be able to see faraway people in the flesh but can return home to my family and sleep in my own bed. On that note, distribution of freight would truly become a problem of moving atoms and last mile delivery will be about teleporting parcels to a garage vs a living room.
My great-grandmother has to be the single most influential person in my life. Widowed at a young age with two children, she put herself and her two sons through college in an environment that was unfriendly to single mothers. She passed away about 12 years ago with a variety of accolades: Sanskrit scholar, math teacher, expert seamstress, and more.
However, the most notable achievement and one she likely never considered herself was angel investor. Even today, you’ll hear merchants, artists, and others from her community share their stories about her commercial smarts and support as they were trying to get off the ground. Her tenacity, intelligence, work ethic, and ferocity is something I look to the model.
