Meet Us

Tandem’s principals are Sunil Bhargava, Doug Renert and Joyo Wijaya, and we created Tandem for other entrepreneurs. We know how to architect technology that performs and scales, how to position and price services for rapid adoption, how to strike partnerships that drive growth, and how to raise visibility with a view towards liquidity. We also have an extended team of experts and service providers who understand startups and, like us, will contribute their sweat to help drive a company's growth and success.

Sunil Bhargava – The Strategist. Loves ideas and entrepreneurship. He spent the first ten years of his career in deep technology, working at Xerox PARC, HP and Oracle. He then was on the founding team at Webvan, where he helped build technology that drove a service that combined the challenges of Amazon and FedEx. He experienced the entire cycle of a company from zero to $4 Billion and back in a few short years. He learned a lot about customers (acquisition and retention) and about operations (costs and excellence). He then co-founded Business Signatures, where he played a key role in every aspect of the business, including defining, marketing and selling the product until the company’s acquisition by Entrust in 2006.

Sunil holds a B.S.E.E. from Indian Institute of Technology, an M.S.C.S. from Rice University, and an M.S. in Management from Stanford University.

Doug Renert – The Dealmaker. Always focuses on building value through relationships. Never stops studying the art of the deal. He started his career as a corporate attorney with Gray Cary (now DLA Piper), where he was first exposed to startups and quickly learned that he could be of more use on the business side of the table. He then spent eight years at Oracle, where he caught the “business creation” bug, buying and building businesses to catapult Oracle into new markets. He left Oracle in 2005 to build Tello, a venture-backed company delivering IP communications services to business users, from the ground up.

Doug has a JD and MBA from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA from Princeton University.

Joyo Wijaya – The Technologist. Joyo is our technical conscience, making sure we build everything soundly and never have to retrace our steps. Before entering the startup world, Joyo spent over 11 years at Oracle leading teams working on the company’s core database technology. He was then Chief Architect at Webvan and most recently co-founded Business Signatures (with Sunil) and ran engineering there until the company was acquired in 2006 by Entrust, where he remained as VP of Engineering until summer of 2007.

Joyo has an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from University of California at San Diego.

Sanjay Vaswani – Strategic Principal. Assists founders in honing their business strategies, partnering with larger industry players and gaining exposure to prospective acquirers. Sanjay works with hundreds of the top executives in technology and healthcare in his role as a partner with the Center for Corporate Innovation (CCI), and he now offers his domain experience and network of relationships for the direct benefit of Tandem portfolio companies. At CCI, he conducts executive forums exclusively for CEOs, Presidents, and senior executives of major technology organizations. Prior to CCI, Sanjay was at McKinsey & Company, Inc.

Sanjay holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin.