IlyaFushman

In 2007, a 26-year-old Stanford PhD student named Ilya Fushman published a paper in Nature demonstrating quantum gates using photons trapped inside photonic crystals and quantum dots. It was a genuinely hard problem solved with real elegance. Nobody in venture capital noticed. Nobody was supposed to. That would come later.

The path from that physics lab to a partnership seat at Kleiner Perkins - one of the most iconic addresses in venture capital - runs through some of the most interesting moments in Silicon Valley history. Dropbox when it was still scrappy. Index Ventures during the Slack years. And KP during a moment when the firm itself was reinventing what it meant to be Kleiner Perkins.

Fushman grew up across three countries - Russia, Israel, Germany - before landing in the United States. He studied physics at Caltech, earned a PhD at Stanford, and then did something unusual: he stopped doing science and started building products. First at Solar Junction, where his team set world records for solar cell efficiency. Then at Khosla Ventures as a principal, getting a taste of the investment side. Then at Dropbox, as one of the company's first 75 employees, building the developer platform and Dropbox for Business from the inside.

Being employee #75 at a company that eventually goes public is not a footnote. It means you were there when the product was still a bet - writing code, running experiments, shipping features that millions of people would eventually use. Fushman ran product for both the consumer and business lines. He understands what "scale" means not as a PowerPoint metaphor but as a technical and organizational reality he personally navigated.

In 2015, Index Ventures - the pan-European firm known for backing Dropbox, Robinhood, and Figma - made Fushman its first new General Partner in five years. That's a long hiring bar. The mandate was to build Index's presence in the enterprise software and infrastructure markets, and he delivered: Slack (before Salesforce paid $27.7B for it), Intercom, KeepTruckin (now Motive), CultureAmp, Optimizely. The vintage looks different now than it did at the time.

When Kleiner Perkins came calling in 2018, it made a specific kind of sense. KP had spent years reconstituting itself - shedding the growth-stage experiments that had diluted its identity, refocusing on early-stage bets, and rebuilding around partners with deep operational credibility. Fushman fit that template precisely: someone who had built products, sat on boards, and - critically - understood the actual mechanics of the enterprise software market from the inside.

At KP, the portfolio reads like a curated argument about what the next decade of enterprise looks like: Rippling (HR and IT infrastructure), Harvey (AI for legal work), Motive (AI for fleet and physical operations), Loom (async video, acquired by Atlassian), Robinhood (financial infrastructure). These aren't scattered bets. They share a thesis about companies that use technology to restructure the operational backbone of industries that have been slow to change.

In early 2024, when Kleiner Perkins announced $2B in new capital across the KP21 and Select III funds - explicitly focused on AI - Fushman was on stage explaining the moment. More than 80% of pitches to KP now involve AI, he noted. That's not a trend to surf. That's the water the firm swims in.

His personal motto - "per aspera ad astra," through hardship to the stars - was apparently chosen before the resume got impressive. It describes a sensibility more than a career arc: someone who treats difficulty as part of the path, not an obstacle to it. Whether that comes from growing up across three cultures, navigating the gap between physics and product, or simply watching enough founders struggle through the hard parts, it's consistent with how people who've worked with him describe his style. Direct. Curious. Willing to stay with the difficult question longer than most people are comfortable with.