Proby Shandilya

I'm an early-stage investor at Work-Bench. We're an early stage venture firm based in New York City, focused on investing in the next generation of applied AI and software infrastructure companies at seed.

If you spend time with anyone who knows me, they'll probably tell you I'm obsessed with enterprise software, early stage venture, and startups/businesses writ large. They're probably right. I've always had a deep curiosity around what makes the great ones great....that curiosity was expressed early by writing two books about basketball and the factors that made players successful and teams champions. Over time, that curiosity expanded to businesses, and I began to spend my time studying great founders and great companies.

I fell in love with enterprise software in 2023. There was something special to me about products that serve as the "offensive line" (football analogy) for their customers, abstracting away complexity to let people to spend time on what they're uniquely special at and enable businesses to reach outcomes not possible otherwise. Whether it was AWS enabling developers to get started instantaneously (vs having to buy and rack servers), Stripe expanding the range of products a business could ship, or Mongo enabling developers to experiment faster without having to think about schema, etc. The more of these companies I studied, the more fascinated I became with all of enterprise IT - both the customer value they create and the beautiful businesses they become. Just read Salesforce 10Ks/earnings calls year after year and look at how well they've compounded business lines outside of core CRM, harnessing the advantage of being a system of record and using to find more ways to serve their customers + build revenue.

As a huge Charlie Munger fan, I'm a big believer in multidisciplinary thinking: taking mental models from a wide array of areas - sports, biology, history, physics, film, etc - and seeing what they teach us about building companies. Over time, those ideas add up to a latticework. I write about it in The Latticework.

My favorite part of this job is meeting exceptional folks in the startup ecosystem who are students of their game, relentlessly curious, dreamers, and want to do their life's work. If that's you, I'd love to jam. Say hi on X or Linkedin.