Alumni Q&A: Girish Pancha

Alumni Q&A: Girish Pancha (GEng’88)

Girish Pancha is a tech executive based in San Francisco who attended Penn as a master’s student in electrical engineering from 1986 to 1988. He was recently appointed Chief Executive Officer at Matillion, a leader in AI Data Automation software. After graduating from Penn Engineering, Pancha began his career at Oracle, where he managed the development of the firm’s first business intelligence products. From there, he founded and sold two companies, Zimba and Streamsets, with a long stint as Chief Product Officer at Informatica in between. He also served as a Venture Advisor at New Enterprise Associates (NEA) where he provided strategic guidance to startups. In this Q&A, Pancha discusses pivoting from engineering into management and startups, his most impactful professor and the cheesesteak spot he misses the most.

Tell us about your time at Penn Engineering as a student.

I came to Penn after finishing my B.S. at Stanford University. I was admitted in September 1986 as a Ph.D. Student in Electrical Engineering, but decided to leave with a master’s degree for a job at Oracle in July 1988. During my first year on campus, I was a teaching assistant for Jan Van der Spiegel’s electronics courses for juniors. I lived in Grad Towers on Chestnut Street (which was way too close to the New Deck Tavern for my own good). In my second year, I worked with Santosh Venkatesh as a research assistant. That year, I roomed with some graduate and undergraduate friends off campus near the (now defunct) incomparable Billy Bob’s Steaks (where I had too many chicken cheesesteaks at 2:00 a.m.).

What was your most memorable moment at Penn?

For me, it was going to my first Penn football game. I was a TA for a couple of football players, which really hit home that Penn had true student athletes, unlike most universities. The game was against Columbia, which was on a multi-year losing streak, so the Penn energy was great, even if the attendance was light! The Quakers went on to have an unbeaten season and were Ivy League champions, which made the game and the season truly memorable.

Which professor had the greatest impact on you and why?

While I interacted with a number of great professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering, my advisor, Santosh Venkatesh, had the greatest impact on me as a student. As a young professor that had just joined Penn from CalTech, and who was focused on the emerging field of AI, he brought excitement and energy to the Department. Despite his intellectual prowess, he was very approachable and got me super excited. I learned so much about applying the abstract mathematics I learned throughout high school and college to something meaningful. His class in computational neuroscience was challenging, but the application to pattern recognition was decades ahead of its eventual commercial value in AI.

What is a fun fact about you?

I never put to use the technical skills I learned in college! I ended up taking up a job at Oracle straight out of my master’s degree, and programming in a language (C) that I did not know and in a domain I had not been exposed to Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). I parlayed my first software engineering job into engineering management roles, and ultimately ended up being a CEO and CXO at both startups and public companies. What college gave me was the ability to think critically and the confidence to learn rapidly.

What inspires you to give to Penn?

My exposure to Penn was specific to the Electrical Engineering graduate group at The Moore School. The professors and my fellow students created and thrived in a culture that was both supportive and challenging and set me up for success in my career. While my undergraduate and graduate studies were fulfilling in different ways, the fact that Penn gave me scholarships to fund me as a foreign student and enabled me to launch a successful career in Silicon Valley is something that I have always appreciated. It gives me great satisfaction to give back to Penn and I intend to do so for many more years.