“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Relax, you’re still getting to know each other,’ but I couldn’t help how I felt,” Ms. Robson would later say in her vows.
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In September, Ms. Robson’s job called her back to New York for a week and a half. “I felt my life without Robby kinda sucks,” Mr. Chamakkala said.
Ms. Robson, 31, is a partner in Cowboy Ventures, a women-led venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, Calif. She is also the founder of Modern Angels, a community of female and nonbinary angel investors. She grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and is a graduate of Ivey Business School at the Western University in London, Ontario.
Mr. Chamakkala, 35, who grew up in Selden, N.Y., is the son of immigrants from Kerala, India. He is a senior director for customer partnerships at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. He graduated from Fordham University. Both Mr. Chamakkala and Ms. Robson were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in venture capital: he in 2018, she in 2021.
By March 2022, they moved in together in the NoPa neighborhood of San Francisco, where they still live.
In October 2022, so unsuspecting of Mr. Chamakkala’s beach outing was Ms. Robson that when they reached a blanket with champagne on Marshall’s Beach in San Francisco, she assumed it was for someone else. Mr. Chamakkala got down on one knee to propose — and drew a complete blank. “My boss told me to think about what I was going to say and be sure it’s meaningful,” he said. “I had this whole thing I wanted to say, and I maybe said three lines of it.”