Founding Smartsheet and its vision: Conversation w/ Praerit Garg, President of Product & Innovation

From Startup to Exit

Smartsheet is a major success story for the Seattle Tech ecosystem. Smartsheet was founded in 2005 as a workplace management system based on a spreadsheet style architecture. In this episode, Praerit Garg (PG) talks about the early product vision for Smartsheet. How, unlike dedicated product management tools like Asana, Smartsheet is very flexible and adapts to a number of workplace management scenarios. PG discusses the new product innovations that Smartsheet has introduced based on AI. As a startup founder himself, PG shares some of the key lessons that he learned in starting a startup.

Praerit Garg is President of Product & Innovation at Smartsheet. He is passionate about building a product and engineering culture of innovation that scales, finding simpler solutions to hard problems, and delivering great experiences for our customers.
PG has more than 25 years’ experience building large-scale distributed systems and internet services. Prior to Smartsheet, Praerit was a general manager at AWS for identity, access, and directory services. Previously, he co-founded Symform, a distributed internet storage startup which was acquired by Quantum. PG was also at Microsoft for 12 years, where he was responsible for many of the user identity, access, and encryption features in Windows. While there, he led the delivery of distributed systems management capabilities across multiple Microsoft products and was part of the team that built Active Directory. PG is also co-inventor on more than 25 patents.
PG holds a master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University. He loves to travel with his family, experiencing different cultures and their food, art, architecture, and history.

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