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COPYRIGHT 2001 BY WORLDSOURCES, INC., A JOINT VENTURE OF FDCH, INC. AND WORLD TIMES, INC. NO PORTION OF THE MATERIALS CONTAINED HEREIN MAY BE USED IN ANY MEDIA WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION TO WORLDSOURCES, INC.

LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER, BUSINESS INDIA

Cause for optimism

Matunga to Murray Hills - Arun Netravali (BTech '67 EE)

Summer of the patriarch - Kanwal Rekhi (BTech '67 EE)

Intrapreneur - Krish Prabhu (MSc '75 Physics)

The Yang - Sunil Wadhwani (BTech '74 ME)

Capitolist - Sudhakar Shenoy (BTech '70 EE)

Home sick chipman - Satish Soman (BTech '82 EE)

A man to bank on - Shailesh Mehta (BTech '71 ME)

"I am a parallel entrepreneur" - Hemant Kanakia (BTech '76 EE)

The IP musketeers - Vijay Nadkarni (BTech '83 EE)

Challenges of reinventing - Bharat Desai (BTech '75 EE)

This special issue celebrates the success of Indians in Silicon Valley, USA. In this issue, we focus only on the IT and electronics sector and have not covered other success stories in biotech, banking, retailing or any other field. While most of the companies and persons covered are in the Silicon Valley, we specially sent a four-person team to Boston (Route 128 was the original hi-tech area), New York/New Jersey, Washington, Dallas and then to the Bay area to visit those successful companies and write about the people behind them.

There have been a large number of outstanding successes. Some of the people we visited are by now well-known names in India. Others who have been equally successful, and in many cases with bigger fortunes, are much less known in India. We tried to cover as many as was possible, but no such list can ever be exhaustive. Also, almost every month or two, new individuals surface or new companies with new technologies are formed. But it is not only individual entrepreneurs who constitute the Indian success in the Silicon Valley. The truth is that there are literally hundreds of Indians in key executive positions in almost every hi-tech company in the Valley. Many of whom are responsible for cutting-edge technology being brought to market. And even less visible are the scientists in research labs and in academia who are working in technologies of the future. And then one cannot overemphasise the role being played by the thousands of programmers and technicians who form the base of Indian talent in the US. These are ordinary people from ordinary backgrounds, who, by sheer dent of their ability and hard work have established a base in the US and have earned widespread respect for India's human capital and talent. It is from this very base that the future stars will emerge.

This brings us to an important question. If Indians can be so successful in the US, cannot this have happened in India? Sadly, the answer is, not yet. In India, we are only now beginning to see the emergence of a culture of innovation in hi-tech. We can copy well, but how many new ideas
has our industry come up with? But these things do not happen in a vacuum. To start with, there have been no sources of funds for a strong domestic venture capital industry. The tax and regulatory regime would not have allowed for such a flowering. And then, there is no industry to take up and deploy the new technologies rapidly. One only has to take a look at Israel to see how many small hi-tech companies, though based in Israel, really function as an outpost of the Silicon Valley. All this can also change very quickly in India if industry and government put their minds to it.

And that's when we really will join the world leaders in technology and hi-tech.

It is my firm belief that the market for human capital should be free from artificial barriers, should permit the brightest minds to tap global opportunities, and should encourage businesses to work very hard towards winning the war for talent. It is also my firm belief that all Indians, especially those who have had the benefits of material success, have an obligation to actively contribute some of their valuable time, or if not, at least some financial capital, towards the undoubtedly challenging task of nation-building.

The accomplishments of non-resident Indians have formed the theme for many a lead story in both domestic and international press publications. Whether it is Amartya Sen and Hargobind Khurana in academia; Rajat Gupta and Victor Menezes in Corporate America; Vinod Khosla, Pradeep Sindhu and Desh Deshpande in techno-entrepreneurship; Raj Bagri, Laxmi Niwas Mittal, Swraj Paul and the Hindujas in the UK; or Hari N. Harilela in Hong Kong, there are innumerable instances of non-resident Indians achieving the highest standards of excellence in their chosen professions and thereby building brand equity for India. To me, the large pool of expatriate Indians is a great asset for the country. They are the ambassadors for India; they offer invaluable relationships, capital, mentoring and business opportunities for Indian entrepreneurs; they help Indian businesses reap the benefits of globalisation; and they help the country build export competitiveness.

The NRI community has, over the years, undergone significant changes - both in its demographics and in its contribution to India's economic development. From being a mute spectator in the 1970s, the NRI has increasingly taken up the role of an active participant in India's economic well being. As per the records of the Reserve Bank of India, direct contribution from NRIs grew four-fold from $3.6 billion in 1990-91 to $14.4 billion in 1999-2000. It is interesting to note that China's growth in the 1970s and 1980s was facilitated by large foreign direct investments (FDI) by non-resident Chinese, which amounted to around $30 billion a year by the 1970s. In contrast, the total inflow from NRIs, three decades later, is only around half that level, FDI being but a small constituent of this amount.

Thus, unlike the Chinese, NRIs have not been the harbingers of increased activity in the manufacturing sector. Instead, their contribution has largely been in the form of remittances and deposits with Indian banks, notably from the Middle East. This has contributed to stability on the foreign exchange front, which, in turn, has helped stabilise the rupee and enabled effective management of domestic interest rates and inflation.

Of course, these numbers only convey part of the overall picture. The intellectual capital and time contributed by high achievers outside India is, quite simply, invaluable, as is the brand equity spin-off for India from their achievements.

This is especially visible in the technology sector. In recent years, around 25 per cent of the technology ventures in Silicon Valley have had Indian minds behind them; over 750 technology companies in the Valley are now Indian-managed. With the emergence of the IT professional, the last decade saw a significant shift in the demographics of the NRI pool. At home, the success of India's IT services industry has underscored India's comparative advantage in knowledge-based industries. NRIs have had a significant role to play in these developments - by providing relationships and mentoring through networks such as The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), by providing financial capital in personal and professional capacities, by influencing government policies in India and the US, and by helping to establish high-quality institutions of higher learning.

Today, it is widely acknowledged that India's greatest economic asset is its talent pool. India's vast population, its socio-economic milieu and its educational system have all resulted in a pool of high-potential human resources that, given adequate institutional support and exposure to Western business practices, has the potential to collectively fuel the nation's economic development. Given that India's best shot at prosperity will be through its knowledge industries, given that the only constraint to achieving our collective economic ambitions is inadequate institutional support, it is absolutely critical to establish well-managed, well-funded institutions of learning that will arm many more people across all strata of society with high-quality, relevant education.

Two recent initiatives in this direction are the Indian School of Business (ISB) and the Global Institutes for Science and Technology (GIST), which together with the IITs, IIMs, IISc, IIITs, RECs and other institutions, are expected to equip youngsters with the skills and relationships needed to transition into world-class professionals.

In sum, the contribution of NRIs to India has been invaluable, especially in recent years. The future of our relationship with our overseas compatriots holds a lot of promise, provided we, as a nation, choose to proactively draw upon their strengths and make it easy for them to work with us. The pace of change in the global business environment, continuing globalisation and the consequent erosion of borders, the increasing domestic imperative to accelerate economic development, the urgent need to encourage the economically deprived sections of our society to participate in this prosperity - all these point to the need for high-quality education at all levels. And it is especially in this sector that NRIs can add tremendous value.

A lot remains to be done, especially over the next 10 years or so. However, the improvement in the quality of governance in some parts of the country, the increased focus on education and other human development imperatives, efforts by our educational institutions to proactively target their overseas alumni, and the proven energy and enthusiasm of many non-resident Indians to make a lasting contribution to their motherland are compelling reasons for continued optimism.

Matunga to Murray Hills

Arun Netravali was a very busy man when we tried to meet him in Murray Hills, the headquarters of famed Bell Labs. He kept changing the appointment. Finally, we had to do a telephonic interview. He was definitely keen to meet us, but probably other corporate priorities came in the way. The temporary woes of Lucent; falling revenues, bad debts to networks, falling stock price, which has taken a massive 80 percent erosion in the last nine months; all of which finally led to the CEO being sacked in late October, might have kept Netravali busy at Lucent.

We missed an opportunity to have a spin around the famed Bell Labs, where one is said to run into a Nobel Laureate in every corridor. Handling all this talent and channellising some of their energy into commercially useful directions is obviously a challenge for its President, Arun Netravali. Bell Labs has been the mother of several inventions in fibre optics, telecommunications, computer languages, lasers and, of course, semiconductors, including the transistor. But largely, others have reaped the benefits of inventions in Bell Labs, as in the case of Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), owned by Xerox on the West Coast.

Amidst the current boom in networking startups, mergers and acquisitions, Lucent has had a dubious distinction. It has been a nursery for many ideas, which come to fruition outside of it and when it acquires companies it is unable to retain a large percentage of key personnel from the acquired companies. Thus, Netravali and his colleagues have their work cut out.

When we asked him about optical networking and its prospects he said: "There is no question, optical is the technology of choice for long-distance communications. Today, the same fibre is carrying a larger number of bytes. Similarly, in the metro segment optical is quite established. At
an enterprise level or backbone level, there is an increasing use of fibre. What has multiple possibilities is the access network. Fast optoelectronic switches and routers have to be used, since there is no optical logic or memories still. Till then, pure optical networks cannot become a reality. So, hybrid technologies are being used. What we have now are lambda routers which do not route individual packets but entire wavelengths."

Netravali does not deny the fact that there is a slowdown in the economy, which is affecting all corporations. "But it is far less than what is made out. As far as telecom spending goes, several CLECs which came as competitors to local phone carriers have suffered revenue losses or have gone down, but ILECs involved in long distance are ordering new equipment," he says. He agrees with Desh Deshpande of Sycamore that in the crunch time there is an acceleration in switching to new technologies, since you want a bigger bang with the same buck.

He warms up when you talk about video compression in which he has several patents and research papers. Netravali led the work in establishing MPEG standards and the HDTV initiative. "High Definition TV could not take off due to several reasons, one of them being the high cost of the tube and not enough investments in research worldwide. But I think it will make a comeback with convergence. Instead of TVs, you will have computer screens giving you HD pictures, once enough bandwidth becomes available," he says.

Born in a small town, Ankola in Karnataka, Netravali grew up in Matunga, Mumbai. After five years in municipal school, he joined King George High School and later Elphinstone College. After a brilliant career in IIT Bombay, where he graduated with a BTech in EE in 1967, Netravali went to Rice University, Houston for his PhD. After his graduate school, he joined NASA for two years before he landed up in the Mecca of research, Bell Labs, in 1972. Since then he has steadily risen to now become its president.

To Arun family still comes first. He loves tennis and travel, but "my priority is spending time with my family," he emphasises. Arun Netravali holds over 60 patents in the areas of computer networks, human interfaces to machines, picture processing and digital television. He has been an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also served on the editorial board of the ieee, and is currently an editor of several journals.

Netravali's is an impressive story of a journey from the impoverished municipal schools of Mumbai to the highest levels of engineering research.

The guy with the algorithm "Indians make good CTOs but not good CEOs," used to be the common perception among financiers, VCs and eventually even among Indian entrepreneurs. The story of Kanwal Rekhi doggedly fighting - earlier in Excelan, which he had founded, and then in Novell - to be the CEO is too well known. He was called the "guy with the algorithm". Today it is no longer true. More and more Indians are founders & CEOs, whether it is Desh Deshpande, Mukesh Chatter, Vivek Raghavan, Samir Desai or Sudhakar Shenoy. Confidence, born out of success, oozes out when they talk to the media, Wall Street analysts or customers. But there are others, brilliant engineers who are happy to be founders & CTOs like Pradeep Sindhu, Vivek Mehra & Hemant Kanakia.

Kanwal Rekhi carries a very simple visiting card, which describes him as president, TIE, and gives his office address as the TIE office at Santa Clara. He is on the board of several companies and organisations, including India's own Nasscom. He has seeded and nurtured dozens of startups, but none of them show up on his card.

For him, TIE is practically home, though he has a beautiful mansion with several acres of estate on a hill in Los Gatos. After he quit Novell in 1994, Kanwal Rekhi has increasingly dedicated himself to making TIE a great mentoring network for Indian entrepreneurs. So much so that today the one figure which comes to the mind when you mention TIE to anybody, is the portly figure of Kanwal.

He has also become a regular figure among the NRI delegations that meet the prime minister and various other dignitaries. Over a period of time he has become good at dispensing aphorisms and instant solutions to India's problems. One may or may not agree with his views and solutions, but no one can question the honesty and love for his motherland that is behind them. During his visit to Washington, Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee met a select group of about 15 NRIs and decided to set up an advisory council of NRIs. A thought that came up during the discussions was that the RI group should sit with various bureaucrats and actually come up with proposals for policy changes. Rekhi is happy about the development. "This way we need not go back and forth and both sides can understand each others' point of view better," he says.

Kanwal's family migrated to India as refugees during the Partition, but he has overcome those scars and is one of the strongest proponents of TIE becoming a network to promote entrepreneurship among all nationalities of the sub- continent. "We do not want politics, religion or culture to come into TIE. Its mission is very clear. Particularly politics divides," he adds.

When we congratulated him on finding a brilliant name in The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), he laughed and told us the story of the evolution of the name. "Initially, the name was International Entrepreneurs. Then we said it should focus on Indian Americans, so it became The IndoUS Entrepreneurs, later we made it into Indus, giving it a new dimension," he recalls. Rekhi is the granddaddy among hi-tech Indians in several ways. His story reflects the changes that have taken place among them. After his BTech at IIT Bombay in 1967. Rekhi went to the US to do his PhD in EE at Michigan Tech, but dropped out after the MS. "My advisor was very keen that I continue, but I got a job offer for a princely sum of $11,250 pa at a computer firm in New Jersey. My advisor opposed the idea very strongly. Then I asked him how much money he was making as a PhD and a professor. He replied, $10,500. I said: 'That proves my point since I am being offered $11,250!' He was aghast," says Kanwal. "It was 1969 and $11,250 was a good sum. I rejected a job offer from IBM and took up one from a small company in New Jersey. After a few months, I was laid off. I went back to IBM asking them if the offer was still good. IBM said that since I had rejected their offer without sufficient reason, I was not eligible to ever apply to IBM. So, after shutting myself out of 80 per cent of the computer industry, I took another offer from another small company in Florida. I was laid off from that too. I decided to join big companies from then on. So I joined RCA and got married to my American pen pal. In another few months I got laid off from there also. Here I was, just married and had been laid off thrice in two years!" he recollects. "That taught me a serious lesson. Never be loyal to any company you join. They will use you and lay you off when they want. I said to myself: 'Nobody is going to lay me off anymore. I will quit a company when I choose.' So, in 1971, when I got a job in Santa Clara Valley (it was not called Silicon Valley then) I used to attend job interviews and keep a job offer in my pocket. I also started attending all kinds of courses in law, business and software in the early morning hours at Santa Clara University, making sure that I learnt new skills all the time and did not become obsolete," he said. Kanwal also got a couple of patents in digital signal processing, which increased his confidence.

In 1981, Rekhi left a very well paying job and with two of his friends, Dr Naveen Jain and Dr Inder Mohan Singh, founded Excelan. "It was the first Internet company. We developed technology for connecting all kinds of computers using Ethernet and TCP/IP. In 1987 we went public. It was the first Indian founded company to go public. Soon, Novell and Microsoft started wooing us and we merged with Novell, which was a hot company then. I became its CTO and a board member. Novell, however, screwed up in 1993 and went after Microsoft. I quit in 1994. The job had become routine and I felt physically and spiritually burnt out," says Kanwal, giving a brief outlin of the long story of his unsuccessful attempt to become the CEO of Novell and lead it from the front. Today he mentors dozens of wannabe entrepreneurs a week, the story of him helping K.B. Chandrasekhar and B.V. Jagadeesh with Exodus having spread far and wide. But his passion is spreading the TIE message far and wide. Already, TIE chapters are functioning in several cities of India and two in Pakistan. There is a plan to establish them in other countries as well.

While Kanwal is busy building these TIEs that bind, an international business magazine called him a benign Godfather and even attempted to find physical similarities with Marlon Brando. A person familiar with an Indian family or a village would have more appropriately called him a patriarch, elder brother or even a village elder.

Intrapreneur

When we talk about 'Wag the Dog' in such a serious story on cutting-edge telecom, it is obvious that we are not talking about the Hollywood black comedy on Washington's spin doctors, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. This is a real-life story of a small division of a large established international company; how it grew to be more powerful and larger in revenue than the mother organization and redefined the space the mother company was occupying. That is truly the tail wagging the dog.

This is what has happened in Alcatel. The French major is being wagged by its division in the US. The man who has provided the leadership for thisextraordinary phenomenon is Bangalore's Krishnananda Prabhu. He is currently the COO of Alcatel worldwide and the CEO of Alcatel USA. Alcatel USA had a revenue of $500 million in 1995. Five years later in 2000, the revenue has grown 10 times to $5 billion! Today, Alcatel, this European kid, has broken into the US market in a big way and is competing hotly with the Nortels and the Lucents as a Telecom equipment provider.

Krish studied physics in IIT Bombay (MSc - 1975) and went to the University of Pittsburgh to do his PhD in solid state physics. However, half-way through, he realized that his interests lay more in the applied side of semiconductor physics and completed an MS and later a PhD in EE at the same university in 1980.

He then joined Bell Labs and worked with Arun Netravali for five years doing cutting-edge work in video compression, coders and decoders and so on. The result was the experimental broadcast of the 1984 LA Olympics using digital techniques. Krish then joined Rockwell International in Dallas, Texas and started working on fibber optics. In 1991, Alcatel took over Rockwell and Krish became its CTO and head business development till 1995. He then spent two years in Europe developing broadband systems in Belgium. Krish was then appointed as CEO Alcatel USA in 1997 and moved back to Dallas. He has engineered several acquisitions by Alcatel in the US worth more than $17 billion.

Krish's reputation as a leader in fibber optic technology has led to his induction on the board of Photuris and optical startup in the Valley. How come he has not set up a startup himself? "Well, a time will come to go out and be enterprising. So far, I have done that within this company. After all, Alcatel USA was practically a startup," says he. The drawn out "well" might mean Alcatel USA should start looking for another CEO soon, though Krish is not saying anything.

On Indians dominating networking and particularly optical companies, Krish says: "IP took off in the '90s. It is software intensive and the only guys who seemed to know how to write OSI layer software were Indians. So, they took over."

Alcatel has used Krish's India connection very well and has started three development centers in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi with almost 1,000 engineers working there. Which gives him a convenient excuse to visit India often.

Many companies and people talk about intrapreneurship opportunities in large companies. But Krish Prabhu and Alcatel have shown that it can be more than hype, and have actually turned it into reality.

The Yang

If his partner Ashok Trivedi is aggressive and outspoken, then Sunil Wadhwani is equally suave and thoughtful. They seem to form a good team. Sunil, after his BTech in mechanical engineering in 1974 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, came to Pittsburg to finish his MBA at Carnegie Mellon University. After trying his hand at a startup in healthcare, Sunil met with Ashok Trivedi, who had ideas of starting a computer services business.

They teamed up to start Mastech. Those were the very early days of software services. We had taken space in a business center sharing a secretary among 20 businesses. We used to call businesses offering our services and the secretaries would not let us speak to anybody, they would say: `Send info about your company.' How could we? We had no customers, no referrals. So, Ashok and I started coming to office very early, when most secretaries would not have come. Normally, senior executives come earlier than their secretaries. So, if you called in those 15-30 minutes, the executive would pick up the phone himself and then you would get a chance to speak with him, and may be meet him later. We developed cold calling into an art form. Once we got our first couple of customers, things started improving.

However, the fortunes of Mastech improved dramatically, once local area networks started coming in 1986-'87. Even those were very early days, and we had to convince companies to use open platforms and client server architecture space. But that gave us a tremendous first mover advantage, recalls Sunil.

Under his leadership, Mastech grew to over $500 million in revenues. Mastech was listed four times in Inc. magazine's ranking of the fastest- growing companies in the United States. During the last 30 years, Wadhwani has achieved a long, successful track record as an entrepreneur, culminating in the creation of iGATE Capital. He has led the launch of 15 new IT service businesses, all developed around strategies that served emerging technology market needs. Today, Wadhwani serves on the Board of directors of Carnegie-Mellon University, the Information Technology Association of America and the Pittsburgh Technology Council.

Capitolist

When the US presidential battle shifted to sun-kissed Florida, many businessmen went about their businesses in a normal way. Of course, they were interested in a result and wished, along with many Wall Street analysts, that the market would recover once the uncertainty is over.

Sudhakar Shenoy, chairman of IMC. He had more than a passing interest in the result. After all, Sudhakar is an active member of the Republican Party and had even organized the first million dollar fund-raising dinner on the east coast for George W. Bush. Sudhakar takes an active interest in the political scene in the state of Virginia and his status as a hi-tech entrepreneur in the area has made him a close advisor to governor Jim Gilmore. Way back in 1995, he accompanied the late Ron Brown, US commerce secretary, along with 24 other CEOS of Fortune 500 companies, on a mission to India and later to Spain. Moreover, during the recent presidential elections, he was taken into Bush's inner circle as an IT advisor. Not surprisingly, Time magazine, in its 14 August 2000 issue, profiled him as one of the hi-tech movers and shakers in the Washington, DC area.

Most Indians tend to support the Democratic Party, so how come he is an ardent Republican? "It is a matter of personal choice, of course, but with strong family values, built-in fiscal and social conservatism, I think Republicans are closer to Indians in thinking," says he. During the elections, Bush was puzzled too by the strong Indian support for the Democrats. "It's the Republican majorities that passed the H1-B Bill. We are not putting pressure on India to sign the CTBT. But still, why are Indians favoring Democrats largely?" was his question. Sudhakar is very clear that besides his personal preferences, the Indian-American community should work both sides of the aisle. Indian businessmen also realise that. "Whenever I do fundraising, I tap Indian friends in business and they oblige even if they have also contributed to the Democratic Party," he says.

Has Sudhakar packed his bags to join the Bush administration, now that the horse he backed has won? "Not for me, I have a business to run," he laughs disarmingly. That is not sour grapes. Information Management Consultants is a $60 million company. IMC is a leading information technology-consulting firm, providing expertise in a full range of business information systems design, planning development and implementation in the US and abroad. Over 70 per cent of the company's projects have a significant Internet component. In the early 1980s, IMC'S assignments at the US Department of Commerce required software operating in almost every US government embassy or consulate. Our man in Washington, Sudhakar Shenoy, is a graduate of IIT Bombay and received his MS and MBA from the University of Connecticut at Hartford. Interestingly, both IIT Bombay and Uconn have declared him a distinguished alumnus.

I am in it purely for the money. I have had my fill of hi-tech startups. They take the life out of you. I am into my second one only because I did not make enough money out of Nexabit, as I was not one of the founders. After Axiowave, where I am a founder, I am going to basically pack up and go back to Pune. I want to look after my parents and I might also start a chip design company on the side," says Satish Soman.

"Without this guy we could not have done what we did in Nexabit," says Mukesh Chatter about Satish. If Mukesh is a salesman par excellence, Satish is understatement personified. "The basic idea was already there. My job was to implement it, which is a far easier job. Nexabit was basically Mukesh's baby," says Satish self-deprecatingly. But Mukesh does not let it go at that. "Satish and his crew got our chips designed right the very first time itself. It is some sort of a record. After all, there are millions of lines of embedded code. Even if one line has an error, the chip may not work to your expectations. They worked 16-18 hour days. And do you know how many were in his crew? Two other people! Anywhere else there would have been 50 people on the job," Mukesh says.

The night the critical chip came from the foundry, Mukesh did not even want to be around, since that would have added to the tension. "At two in the morning I got a call from Satish: 'Everything seems OK, the tests are running fine.' Before that the stress was thick enough to be cut with a knife," recalls Mukesh.

Satish Soman was working in LSI Logic in Silicon Valley. He knew about Nexabit and once when he was visiting Boston, he and Mukesh discussed a particularly difficult problem Nexabit was facing. "Of course, the quality of life here is much better than in the Valley, but what actually drove me here was the challenge in Nexabit," says Satish.

He has good memories of his student days in the Electrical Engineering department of IIT Bombay, where he graduated with a BTech in 1982. After working for two years in Tata R&D centre at Tata Electric, he went to Syracuse University to do his masters. In 1986 he received his MS in computer engineering. He then joined Digital Equipment Corporation's chip design and application centre and worked there for nine years. In 1995 he joined LSI logic and worked for two years before joining Nexabit. In both Digital and LSI he designed and implemented several chips of varying complexity but with one common thread - he got them all right in the first pass. He holds two patents and has several research papers to his credit.

He wants to do his bit towards helping his alma mater, IIT Bombay. "After all, I learnt so much there," he says.

Shailesh J. Mehta, Chairman and CEO of Providian Financial, likes to consider himself a venture capitalist. But not one of the Johnny-come- lately types. "Now everybody talks about venture capital," he says. "I was providing venture capital in the '70s."

Despite his long innings as an angel investor and mentor, he has not been hogging the headlines like, say, a Kanwal Rekhi or a Prakash Bhalerao. But that's because he has been in finance. "My profile has been low because I was in the non-hi-tech arena," he explains.

But hi-tech was apparently what he was slated for when he proceeded to Case Western Reserve University after graduating in mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay. At Case Western, he majored in operations research with computer science as a minor. Research appeared to be his cup of tea; during his summer course, he worked on networks and graph theory and solved "one of the greatest unsolved problems" in the area.

His analytical skills led the dean of his college to present him with a proposal to take up a specific project in a local bank - Cleveland Trust Co (now Keycorp). This was a time when gas prices were going up. The bank, which operated a fleet of trucks to pick up cheques from different and far- flung branches, wanted to optimise the truck routes to minimise gas consumption.

Mehta looked at the problem in a different way. The objective, he felt, should be not to save gas but money. There were some branches in which the collections were high. If trucks could visit these branches, perhaps two-three times a day, the processing of these cheques could be speeded up. Other branches, where there was not so much activity, could be served every two to three days. "I found that if we could improve collection by one day, we could save $20,000 a day," says Mehta. "You can buy a lot of gas with that."

Selling the idea to the bank wasn't easy, for Mehta had clearly exceeded his brief. Still, it was bounced up the ladder until a decision was finally taken to try it out. It worked. "That's why I became a banker," says the 51-year-old Mehta.

The next dozen years were spent climbing the corporate ladder at the bank. During this period, he received nine promotions. He was the youngest- ever vice-president and the first non-American to occupy such a position at Cleveland. When he finally decided to call it a day, he was the No.3 executive, running over one-third of the bank's operations.

The next assignment was quite a challenge. First Deposit Corporation, "an information and data-driven, new millennium-type bank" had approached him in 1985 to take charge of its operations. Mehta says he was fascinated, but also scared. "What if this doesn't fly?" he remembers thinking. But, in 1986, when Cleveland's charms were wearing off, he took the plunge. "We started off with an office over a shoe store, no secretary and very little else," he reminisces.

But First Deposit was a very rewarding experience, in more senses than one. In 1985, the company had lost money. In 1986, it made some money. In 1987, it had $1 billion in assets and a bottomline of $2.3 million. That year, it was valued at $120 million. In 1988, GE Caps offered t buy it at $188 million. Mehta bailed out with $20 million for his share of the equity and another $5 million as a golden parachute.

The next stop was Providian, where Mehta continues till today. Under him, the organisation has been going places. Today, it is a leading provider of lending and deposit products to customers in the US, the UK and Argentina. Providian is the fifth largest credit card issuer in America. It has over 12,000 employees, $30 million in assets under management and 15 million customers. Mehta has around 4.2 million shares in stock options and equity. Providian is quoted on the New York Stock Exchange at $46 currently.

That makes Mehta, though no entrepreneur, sitting on post-sale millions, a very warm man indeed. And it's time, he feels, to give back. "Providian is my top priority and my family comes next," he says. "But I have a passion for community and educational programmes." He is a member of the California State University Board of Trustees and a director of the advisory committee of India Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

Back home in India, he has been very active too. He has contributed $2 million to IIT Bombay to set up the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management. "That's where our dreams began," says he. "We must help others achieve theirs too."

There are other causes he is supporting through the Shailesh J. Mehta Foundation, which is chaired by his wife Kalpa. His better half is an accomplished dancer, which serves as a focus for some of his community development initiatives. His family includes son Samit, 25, and daughter Sheetal, 22.

His children having grown up, Mehta has more time these days for another of his passions - mentoring. He was one of the early players in TIE. Today, he has a private investment fund - Mehta Magic plc - set up entirely with his own money. The donation to IIT is but one way of remembering his roots. In some senses, he has never really lost touch with them. He still maintains a residence on Mumbai's Napean Sea Road, though only the domestic staff occupies it most of the year. But it's more than just a house; it's a home.

Is there a cultural difference between the east coast and the Silicon Valley? Yes, say both sides. The valley is associated with ostentatious living. "There is too much talk of money nowadays," says Talat Hassan, who has been in the valley for 27 years and seen it change. The Boston Brahmins, however, are more sedate. "We are used to the services culture that existed in the old route 128, of solid companies," says Anita Brearton, VP, Sycamore. One rarely sees a BMW or a Ferrari in the parking lots of Sycamore or other companies around Boston. There is nothing special about the houses belonging to either Desh or Samir Desai or Ram Sudi Reddy. They are comfortable, surrounded by woods of rural Massachusetts and hardly ostentatious.

The wry academic humour, which makes Hemant Kanakia describe himself as a "parallel entrepreneur", using metaphors from electrical engineering, is not a put on. Kanakia is basically an academic. His slow, measured talk and piercing eyes transported us from the Mclean, Virginia, office of Gemplex, to our classrooms.

He takes pride in the fact that he is a true-blooded academic with a number of research papers and patents to his credit. It is said that when he went to VCs to raise funds for his startup -- Torrent Networking Technologies back in 1997 -- he put two conditions on them: that they should accept that the company would be based on the east coast near Maryland so that his wife's career as an academic goes uninterrupted and that they would help him out in handling finance, since he does not understand it. A delighted VC, who was used to entrepreneurs expecting VCs to have their hands off the project after putting in the money, commented: "He knew exactly what he did not know".

The company, within two and a half years, went on to be acquired in a $450 million, all-cash-deal by Ericsson, giving the VCs fantastic returns. So today, when he has launched two companies in two totally different sectors, no wonder they flock to him. "Raising money is never easy. There is the issue of how much equity you are giving away at what price," says Hemant. "But the right VCs play a positive role in building the company. They bring the right connections," he adds.

Hemant was a late entrant in the startup game. Born and brought up in Mumbai, Hemant, graduated from IIT Bombay in 1975. He worked in TCS for a couple of years and then went to the US to do his MS. He worked in a startup for a couple of years. The experience was, apparently, not too pleasant. Though he is tight-lipped, his body language is clear when he says: "That was a good education for me about startup life". So he went to school and did his PhD from Stanford University in computer data networks. When he came out of Stanford in 1990, he joined the Mecca of all researchers -- AT&T Bell Labs. He worked there for seven years, leading the elite research team, composed of AT&T's leading engineers, that designed advanced data network switching technology. The research developed into some of the core technology of today's Internet. "I always wanted to work in research that's useful in the real world," says Hemant. He was delighted when Lucent was spun off with that aim in mind. But when his efforts to commercialise some of his concepts failed within Bell Labs, he left to launch his own startup. His only network then was his old IIT chums, some of who were already in the startup game. They introduced him to VCs in the Valley. When the VCs who saw clear value in his concepts were ready to put in the money provided he located the company in the Valley, Hemant returned to the east coast empty handed. His wife Sonal, a sociologist, had just received a tenure at the University of Maryland and he did not want her career to be affected by shifting the family to the west coast. Pretty soon he found others ready to back him on the west coast and that is how Torrent started." If I had not received funding in time I would have landed myself with a $40,000 credit card debt which I had no money to pay," recalls Hemant. When his company grew from four to 85 within 30 months and developed a gigabit IP router, which could route voice, data
and video, Ericsson saw an opportunity. It was clear that if Ericsson does not have a router of its own to integrate into the wireless infrastructure they build for almost 40 per cent of the cellular companies worldwide, then Cisco would move in.

Ericsson did a quick due diligence and wrapped up the deal for $450 million in cash, the highest at the time for a router startup (Nexabit came later). "On the night of the acquisition I called up Desh and asked him what he was doing after Cascade. He said: 'Angel investing is fine, Kanwal and others are doing it, I did a couple too, but I want hands-on action, so I am launching a new company - Sycamore'. They are also my sentiments. I had my retirement of six to eight months at Ericsson when I helped them integrate the two companies, but when I became free, I launched not one but two start-ups. So instead of a serial entrepreneuryou can call me parallel entrepreneur," says Hemant laughingly.

One of the new companies is Photuris, an optical networking company based in the Valley. Photuris has raised $42 million in second round VC funding and has 100 employees. On board, Hemant has brought in old buddy Raj Mashruwala (Tibco) and two eminent practitioners from the R&D and business sides; C.K. Patel (inventor of the Carbon Dioxide laser at Bell Labs in 1961) and Krishnananda Prabhu (CEO of Alcatel USA and COO of Alcatel worldwide). Clearly, he seems to have longer term plans for Photuris.

"The origin of Gemplex is altruistic. It is clear that there is a digital divide among nations, depending on who has access to what bandwidth. Emerging economies are naturally bandwidth poor too and in the new age of digital commerce these countries will be left even further behind," says Hemant. "Our plan is to build IP networks to emerging economies, linking them up with the developed world. Wherever these countries are liberalising, be it Ireland, Poland, Korea or China, we are there. We are in constant touch with the Indian government too and as soon as the VSNL monopoly over submarine cable is actually removed, we will move in there too. Imagine, South Korea is adding 600 mbps bandwidth every three months and we in India have had only 300 mbps for the last two years. But I am not going to give up soon. I am visiting India practically every month. Without loads of international bandwidth, the business of IT-enabled services will go elsewhere. The window of opportunity is quite narrow. It will not take long for South Korea, Poland and China to catch up with India," he adds.

Indians in the US are very networked," says Gursharan Sidhu, co-founder, senior vice-president (engineering) and chief technology officer of ipVerse. "The connectivity in the community is extremely tight." He should know. The paths of the three co-founders in the company -- the others are Paul Singh, vice-president of business development, and Vijay Nadkarni, vice-president, call control development -- had barely crossed before they discovered that they were all hankering after the same big idea. In fact, Nadkarni was not even in the Valley; he was in Chicago. Thanks to the network and the VCs, "the three of us hooked up and the ideas all fit together," explains Sidhu.

Their backgrounds are also quite different, barring, of course, the technology flavour that is inevitable. Sidhu did his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1967 and then headed for Stanford for graduate studies. "I wanted to become an academic," he says. He acquired a PhD from Stanford and joined the faculty.

Sidhu did a stint in Mexico too, thanks to his Mexican wife who had to leave the US because of visa reasons. He taught at the University of Mexico and was asked by the Mexican government to help in the digital revolution in that country.

He was also close to Vinton Cerf, known as the 'Father of the Internet'. This relationship made him keen to move into that space. Back in the US, he joined Apple, where he was the primary architect and co-inventor of various products and patented technologies related to the AppleTalk Network System, the Macintosh file system, and desktop publishing technologies.

He spent 15 years at Apple, his last assignment there being as an Apple Fellow, which offers much freedom to do one's own thing. In 1997, he left. He "enjoyed" a life of leisure for a year, until ipVerse and the others came along.

"We brought different skills to the table," says Paul Singh. And his career trajectory couldn't be more different. Singh graduated from the Delhi College of Engineering in 1978, worked in Larsen & Toubro in Mumbai for a while and then proceeded to St John's University in New York for his MBA. He has over 20 years of experience in general management, marketing and business development in the communications industry. He was with 3 Com, Sun Microsystems and Telebit (later acquired by Cisco). He started a consultancy company, which was bought by Lucent. In 1994, he became CEO and co-founder of Internetware, an Internet security company that merged with Quarterdeck Corporation. "I then moved into the counselling mode, the mentoring mode," he says. "We are people who have been around the block many times."

That's borne out by Vijay Nadkarni too. He came to Northwestern University after completing his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay. That was in 1983 and his Masters at Northwestern was in optical networking. His first job was at Abbott Labs, where he developed techniques to apply fibre optics to surgery. From the bio-med arena, he moved to telecom and Rockwell Communications. He spent five years in Motorola, first in hardware and then software. Nadkarni was also senior manager at 3 Com/US Robotics, where he headed the voice over IP (VoIP) initiative, and had overall management responsibility for the development and delivery of the industry's most scalable VoIP system, including gateways, gatekeeper and backend elements. Concurrently, he was responsible for 3 Com/USR's Internet Supplementary Services product development. (Incidentally, he holds over a dozen patents in voice, data, and wireless networking.) Then ipVerse beckoned. "This was a startup at the right time," he says.

What is ipVerse, that so enthuses the trio, all about? It is a supplier of next generation softswitch solutions that empower service providers and application developers to rapidly deploy new, revenue- generating services. ControlSwitch, ipVerse's softswitch platform, acts as an open, intelligent network operating system for integrated voice and data communications services.

Sidhu translates that for the layman. "We are the software and services platform for the new, converged telecommunications world," he says. Adds Nadkarni: "We want to be the Microsoft of the new world."

Others may not go that far, but they do realise that ipVerse has got a good thing going. The Sunnyvale (California)-based company has been funded by leading venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Battery Ventures (BV). KPCB was the lead investor in the third round of funding which brought in $21.8 million in September 2000. (The company had earlier raised $3 million in the first round in October 1998 and $16 million a year later in the second round.) Other investors in the third round included NVP and BV (which exercised their pro rata rights); Nissho Iwai, a Japanese trading company which is ipVerse's distribution partner in Japan; and Williams Communications.

The co-founders are unwilling to discuss revenue numbers as they are planning an IPO and they have to toe the SEC line on disclosure of information. But the product is now shipping and is on customer sites. "These technologies take two years to develop," says Nadkarni.

There are already 170 people on board, many of them Indians. Nobody is keeping track of the exact number: "We have become pretty agnostic to the idea of origin. If it were important, we would have it figured out." But Sidhu does agree that Indians have made major inroads in the Valley.

"Opportunity abounds out here," he continues. "You have to focus on execution, execution and execution." Adds Nadkarni: "There is no time to smell the roses."

Yet IpVerse seems destined to flower; Telecommunications magazine has anointed it as one of the hot startups for 2000. One question remains: how did the company get its name? "The first thing to do is to get a domain name," says Sidhu. "We thought of IP Universe, because that's the space we are in. But the name was taken already. One day, while walking down Palo Alto, we thought of ipVerse and rushed home to check the availability. It was available and there were no second thoughts."

They have no second thoughts either, about ipVerse making it to the big league. The other networks The networking in the Indian community in the US is not for professional purposes alone. There are several organisations that are working in the cultural arena. Each community has associations in different geographical areas to keep their ties with the home country alive.

When Bharat Desai, 47, co-founder, president and CEO of Nasdaq-listed Syntel Inc (Nasdaq: SYNT) left India for Detroit way back in 1976, on a six-month assignment for TCS, he had no inkling of what was in store for him -- least of all that he would spend most of his future life in what he calls the land of unbridled opportunities. His six-month stint was extended to 18, and then he decided to stay put.

Desai was born in Kenya and lived there until he was 11. Thereafter, the family migrated to India where he spent most of his youth, graduating in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1975. Soon after, he joined TCS and was sent to the US on a short assignment. Desai pursued his MBA at the University of Michigan's evening program in 1978. "I had to tender a two-year bond to pursue my management studies," reveals Desai. But he was not cut out for a 9 to 5 job. "Business was in my blood; and you will understand this better as I come from a predominantly business community."

While pursuing his Master's program, Desai set up Systems International Inc (which later became Syntel Inc) along with his wife Neerja Sethi, with a mere $1,000 in capital. It was essentially an IT staffing company that specialized in meeting the local needs for developers, programmers and consultants. "I recognized early on the vital need for the people component to this industry and the growing requirement of large corporations to have access to this component on an as-needed basis," explains Desai. "I also visualised global sourcing of these professionals, and the value of providing companies with an immediate provision of these services on a global basis."

The company reportedly earned only $30,000 in revenue in the first year of its operations. "When I started in 1980, I was perhaps the first Indian to be in the technology business in this part of the US," reminisces Desai. People, he says, thought he was crazy to pursue an independent business in the US software industry rather than being "a programmer". But Desai persisted - and succeeded. As evidence, Desai is fond of telling the story of a company in which he was told not to "ever set foot here again" by a senior executive. The defiant Desai didn't heed this advice; he nowsays the company is one of Syntel's biggest customers, though the executive in question is no longer with the company.

A couple of years later in 1982, Syntel acquired General Motors as a client and this ensured a steady revenue flow for the company. In 1984, Syntel made its first $1 million in revenues. A decade down the line, in 1994, Syntel surpassed $50 million in revenue and exceeded 1,000 employees. The company, which has grown continuously since then, also has had its fair share of recognition. Money magazine recognised it as one of the top 50 stocks of 1998; Forbes named Syntel the No. 2 company on its 'Best 200 small companies in America' list; it ranked 29 on Individual Investor's 1998 list of 'America's Fastest Growing Companies'; and, on BusinessWeek's 'Hot Growth Companies' list, Syntel ranked 70th overall. Desai was named '1999 Michigan Entrepreneur' by the Harvard Business School Club of Detroit and 'Entrepreneur of the Year' in 1996 by USA Today, Nasdaq, and Crain's Detroit Business.

Today, Syntel is a publicly-owned company with estimated annual revenues of $165 million in 2000. The company went public in August 1997, and with a sale of 3.45 million shares the company raised $38 million. A year later, Syntel declared a 3-for-2 stock split of the common stock of the company. Following the stock split, the company had approximately 5.18 million shares publicly traded. According to industry analysts, insurance company American International Group accounts for about 20 per cent of Syntel's sales, and co-founding spouses Bharat Desai and Neerja Sethi together own over 85 per cent of Syntel.

The company employs over 2,000 people in 16 offices strategically located throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as four fully-networked Global Development Centres (including one each in Mumbai and Chennai) in the US and India. "We plan to increase the e-business revenue contribution to 30 per cent of total revenues by year-end, and expect a full 75 per cent of our 2000 revenue to come from e-business and applications outsourcing services," says Desai.

Syntel's focus to reinvent itself as an e-business company is both understandable and imperative. For long, it has been a worldwide provider of professional information technology staffing (TeamSourcing), though in the last few years it has concentrated on and built up applications and outsourcing services (Intellisourcing) to Fortune 1000 companies and government entities. In 1992, Syntel opened its first two Global Development Centres - one in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the other in Mumbai. Syntel was one of the first US-based IT service companies to develop a global delivery concept - one that utilizes a 24-hour workday and looks beyond the US market for people resources. This strategic decision created the platform for Syntel's amazing growth track record and moved the company far ahead of the competition. "Intellisourcing is what I believe to be the future of the technology services industry," feels Desai. "Here we provide a total applications management service for our corporate customers. It allows customers to focus their people on their core business and frees up the technology management and applications management responsibilities to organisations like Syntel. So it is the growth area in the business. It is the growth space, I believe, in the industry. It is a higher-value service."

Desai also believes that despite the recent downturn in the markets, NRI-owned and promoted technology companies are sure to outperform others in the years ahead. According to him, apart from the opportunities that this country provides, Indians are very imaginative and hard-working. "For instance, we are much more savvy financially and have a facility with numbers," explains Desai. "Add to this the spirit of innovation and willingness to take risks and you have the perfect recipe for success. What happens two to three generations down the line is anyone's guess. Whether they will also have similar traits is not certain."

On the personal front, he is keen to cultivate these traits in his two children, both born in the US - son Saahill, 16, and daughter Pia, 14. "I try to divide my time judiciously between my work, my family and my personal life." Desai likes playing tennis and golf and is a keen traveller "though Syntel leaves very little time for leisure travel". He misses India, particularly the variety in food. And the easy availability of tea wherever you are. "A cup of tea is only five minutes away," he says.

Desai's other passion is to encourage Web-specific talent. Under his Web Incubator Program, Syntel makes investments in the startup phase followed by funding needed for day-to-day operations. In the first quarter of 2000, the company launched SkillBay.com, a B2B site that brings clients and members to the IT staffing e-marketplace, and New2USA.com, a vertical portal designed to help over one million newcomers navigate life in the USA. "We intend to create our own startups as well as take majority or minority ownership positions in other early or expansion-stage companies," says Desai. This could well be Syntel's strong differentiator in the times of New Economy.

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