Vish Rao Dumpeti

Most senior operators have spent decades doing founding-level work inside other people's companies. Building cap tables they'll never own. That's not a failure. That's a structural condition. And it's shifting forward.

20+ years on the inside of it. Founding-level work at every company.

Yahoo: product shipped to 200 million users. Spotify: built Ad Studio from scratch, 60% year-over-year advertising revenue growth. WeWork: delivered IPO-readiness work generating over $250M in CAPEX savings. CLEAR: launched new verticals, scaling to over 100 million identity uses across 100+ partner venues. Justworks: scaled the team to 250 across 25 product groups spanning NYC, Toronto, and Brazil.

Two founding attempts before this one. MakeMe found product-market fit in health and wellness before the foundation gave way. Vesta Equity taught me what cofounder alignment actually costs. Forward Share Ventures is the third attempt – built on everything they required me to learn. A decade-plus operating across all five lanes: technologist, entrepreneur, leader, investor, and advisor. FSV is the first time they compound into a cap table I own. Not sequentially. All at once.

Welcome to the Age of Agency.

This is a structural shift – the first time expert operators have had the infrastructure to own what they build, not just deliver it. The Expert Economy and the Entrepreneur Economy are converging. The infrastructure to convert human expertise into exponential agency is finally here.

The future of work is micro and polyhat – not small or linear, but precise and parallel. Micro-practices owned by operators with genuine domain depth. Micro-startups built on structural moats that outsiders can't replicate. Micro-funds backing the people closest to the problem. A new kind of professional: the polyhat. Senior operators who've traded the single-company corporate career for a portfolio of deep engagements – advising the companies they care about, consulting on the problems they know best, cofounding the ventures they've been seeing from the inside, investing in the sectors where their pattern recognition is the real edge. Compounding agency across every lane.

Forward Share Ventures is the infrastructure for that conversion. The name says it all: forward what you know, share in what you build. AI-native by design. Two houses. One platform.

Future of Work. The Forward Share Network is a small, close-knit community of entrepreneurial expert operators building micro-practices: operating engagements with equity upside, advisory stakes, and precision investing in the bets only they can see coming. An expert advisor or operator in the Network this year can be a Studio cofounder or coinvestor next year.

Future of Venture. Forward Share Studio cobuilds with founders who bring deep domain expertise, proprietary data, and distribution access as a structural moat – not a pitch. Forward Share Capital backs what we help build: pre-seed conviction, seed-strapped sustainable.

My background runs across nearly every major technology vertical: HR, payroll, and benefits (Justworks) · biometrics and identity (CLEAR) · real estate technology (WeWork) · advertising, media, and adtech (Spotify, MediaMath, Yahoo) · health and wellness (MakeMe) · publishing and research (The New York Times, ProQuest) · satellite and broadband networks (Hughes Network Systems). That breadth isn't a credential list. It's the domain data behind every call I make at Forward Share Ventures.

I came up as a technologist – CS at UMD, then management and innovation at MIT Sloan – and I've never left the technical work behind. Embedded in product, engineering, and design while influencing across marketing, sales, customer success, finance, legal, and people functions. Agile and lean from the beginning. High-trust and cross-functional by design.

What I'm most proud of isn't the products. It's the people and the environments. I believe in IKIGAI – the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what sustains you. A significant part of my leadership has been helping people find and live inside that overlap: shipping careers, not just products, and building rooms where both happen at once. I've received 100+ LinkedIn recommendations – most of them not about the things I shipped, but about what it felt like to build them alongside me.

My lives #SCRIPT as my mission: to enhance the lives of my family, those around me, and myself through Supportive, Constructive, Respectful, Inspiring, Positive, and Trustful actions.

BS in Computer Science, University of Maryland – astronomy and robotics concentration, pre-med. ACE in Management, Innovation, and Technology, MIT Sloan.

Call me Vish or Rao – either works for me.

forwardshare.co • linkedin.com/in/vdumpeti

#AlwaysBeLearning • #AlwaysBeGrowing • #MakeItTogether • #BetterTogether • #KiSS-It

Keep it Simple, S*! Just Get *it Done!