SoftBank ropes in former LinkedIn executive Deep Nishar to head international investments

Japanese telecom and internet giant SoftBank has roped in former senior vice president of products and user experience at professional networking site LinkedIn Deep Nishar as managing director of SB Group US, Inc. He will be based in San Carlos and report to Nikesh Arora, president & COO of SoftBank Group Corp.

In this role, he will work closely with Arora and the leadership team to direct the investments of the SoftBank Group internationally, and counsel and support companies in the SoftBank portfolio.

SB Group US, Inc, formerly known as SoftBank Internet & Media Inc, was created last year by SoftBank to make a push towards internet and digital media investments globally. Indeed Arora was the CEO of this unit before he was recently elevated to a new role at the Japanese firm.

Nishar joins SoftBank from LinkedIn, where he served as senior vice president of products and user experience, responsible for setting and executing the company's global product strategy, since 2009. During his tenure, LinkedIn's membership grew over ten-fold from 32 million to 347 million, revenue grew from $78 million to $2.2 billion and LinkedIn became a top 25 global site.

Before joining LinkedIn, Nishar worked at Google as senior director of products for the Asia-Pacific region. He also played a key role in developing and implementing the company's mobile business globally.

Arora himself is a former Googler and quit the American tech giant last September where he was the chief business officer.

Nishar was also the co-founder of Patkai Networks, a SOA software company, and has co-authored eight patents. He has also made private investments in a bunch of tech firms and as per his LinkedIn profile he quit the internet firm last October. He is also on the board of TripAdvisor and Opower.

Nishar received a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur), an MSEE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.