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.).
