Highland Capital Partners Expands Silicon Valley Team with the Addition of Manish Patel

MENLO PARK, Calif. and LEXINGTON, Mass., Aug. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Highland Capital Partners, a leading venture capital firm with a more than twenty year history of helping great people build great companies, today announced that Manish Patel has joined the firm as a Principal.  Based in Highland's Menlo Park office, Patel will expand Highland's reach into Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial community and help identify and work with the next crop of game-changing startups.

Patel joins Highland from Google where he has held diverse product management and executive management roles.  His experience ranged from serving as a lead product manager for Google's advanced imagery and 3D mapping initiatives to helping grow the company's advertising and syndication efforts into billion dollar businesses.  He was also the product manager responsible for launching the first search and recommendation engine for Google's TV initiative.  While at Google, Patel worked closely with the company founders and Google's executive management team to formulate and manage top-level company goals that scaled to hundreds of teams worldwide.

"Manish brings exceptional domain experience from leading key initiatives at Google along with an excellent reputation within the entrepreneur community," said Peter Bell, General Partner with Highland.  "He'll be a great addition to our West Coast office and we're thrilled to have him onboard."

Patel earned undergraduate degrees in Engineering and Economics from Stanford University, where he was the recipient of the Chilton Award for his work in engineering and the Sobieski Prize for creative thinking in Economics.  He has worked closely with social entrepreneurs in East Africa and is actively involved with the non-profit community in the Bay Area. 

About Highland Capital Partners

Highland Capital Partners was founded with the mission of helping great people build great companies.  Since its inception in 1988, the firm has taken a sector-focused approach to investing in exceptional communications, consumer, digital media, healthcare and information technology companies.  With over $3 billion of committed capital and offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, Shanghai and Geneva, Highland has invested in and worked to create such firms as Ask Jeeves, Avid Technology, CheckFree, Conor Medsystems, Coremetrics, Continental Cable, lululemon athletica, Lycos, MapQuest, Navic Networks, Ocular Networks, Odyssey Healthcare, P.A. Semi, Quigo, Starent Networks, Sybase, Telica and VistaPrint.  For more information, visit Highland's web site at www.hcp.com.

SOURCE Highland Capital Partners