Former Product Management Lead at Google Brings Deep Consumer Internet and Product Innovation Experience to the Highland Team

MENLO PARK, CA & LEXINGTON, MA – August 18, 2010 – 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.