Rajiv Dholakia is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a track record of incubating and growing businesses in AI, Operating Systems, and Security resulting in one IPO [NASDAQ:VLCT] and six acquisitions. His inventions and innovations helped create foundational internet security inventions that are bundled into every modern browser and operating system and are used by billions everyday resulting in a safer internet. Some notable companies included Sun Microsystems, ValiCert, PGP Corp/Symantec, and Nok Nok Labs & the FIDO Alliance.
More recently, he led the creation and industry-wide adoption of a building block for internet security called FIDO/Passkeys. Passkeys deliver a phishing resistant replacement for passwords and legacy MFA. While at Nok Nok Labs, he helped create the industry non-profit FIDO Alliance, seeded its intellectual property, recruited a substantial part of its core membership and evangelized FIDO worldwide for a decade while serving on the board.
Rajiv brings hands-on operating experience in scaling companies from paper-napkin sketches to $100M+ in revenue through hands-on excellence in strategic M&A. He is a a strong advocate of getting to scalable product-market fit through an integrated engineering-product-sales approach.
As an advisor to startups and incubators such as Berkeley’s SkyDeck for a decade Rajiv believes in giving back. He was instrumental in the creation of the legendary all girls robotics team, The SpaceCookies, bootstrapped as a collaboration between NASA & The Girl Scouts. He served on the board of the Girl Scouts of Northern California as a special STEM & Strategy advisor. He is strongly committed to science education, robotics, and the maker movement where he has been both an organizer and volunteer.
Rajiv also served President at Creative Million, a non-profit that seeks to improve the lives of women around the world through women-owned craft cooperatives. Beyond work, Rajiv enjoys art, wooden automata, the great outdoors and can sometimes be found at Bluegrass & Old-time or Celtic music festivals or shaking a leg at Ashkenaz in Berkeley.
