When Prabhu Goel sold his first company in 1990 in the US, he and his wife realised they had more money than they needed. That was when the Goels decided to turn to philanthropy. In 1994 they set up the Foundation For Excellence, seeking to bring about a transformation in the lives of academically brilliant but economically underprivileged students in India. Since then, the Foundation has funded 12,000 students, while as an angel investor, Goel has invested in 30 companies.

Goel is a serial entrepreneur based in California. Son of a civil servant (?I come from a modest middle class family?), he went to IIT, Kanpur, graduated in 1970 and then headed to Carnegie Mellon on a scholarship to do his Ph.D in electrical engineering. On getting his doctorate, he joined IBM in 1973. ?I was one of the few lucky ones to have got a job when the US was going through a recession.?

Goel says that the IBM experience was fantastic. He was given an award for technical contribution in 1981 with a purse of $50,000, which was a fairly big amount those days. At that time, Goel also started thinking about his next step. He felt he had to get out of IBM, which was such a huge entity that it did not exactly offer great prospects in management.

Goel left IBM and spent a year at Wang Laboratories, which was a $3-billion company then. One of the things he had to do was to acquire technology in the open market. He realised that not enough common tools were available. He then decided to start his own company in 1982, Gateway Design Automation. ? I didn?t know how tough it was going to be. I had no network or VCs knocking at my door.? He, however, had savings of $100,000, including the award money he got from IBM, on which he knew he could survive for a year. Goel started organising seminars to make money and to develop software to test technology. In 1983, he made a breakthrough when Texas Instruments placed an order for $50,000. This was followed by Raytheon, where he was able to make a sale of $300,000. ?It took me six months to negotiate with Raytheon, as I was a one-man show,?

he recalls.

Soon Goel recruited a world-class expert in simulation work from UK to work with him. In 1985, they developed a product, Verilog, a hardware description language, which was used by companies like Sun Micro and Motorola. Till

today, Verilog is needed by 99%

electronic products.

With this, things changed suddenly for Goel, and many prospective investors, all of them unsolicited, started crowding in on him, when barely three years back nobody was willing to give him an ear. San Hose-based multibillion dollar Cadence Design Systems even acquired 50% of Goel?s company and Goel helped Cadence set up its India operations.

?We may have been the second largest software company to come to India. We set up operations in Bombay export promotion zone first. But we had to wind up in two months as the person who was heading the project quit. We then moved to Noida and Cadence was the first software company to come up in the town.?

In 1989, his start-up had a turnover of $25 million with a profit of $6 million. By 1990, he sold out to Cadence, and in a couple of years started investing in other companies. Of the 30 companies he has invested in so far, he says some have been very successful and have made huge sums of money and some have been disasters. Some of his first round investments include Rightworks (acquired by i2), Exodus, Versata, Synplicity, and Everest Design. As an angel investor, Goel says he has now become very selective.

One of the companies he is currently involved in is FusionOps, which is developing cloud based business analytics products. Business domain and SAP experts at FusionOps came together to create a fast, easy way for non-experts to analyse business performance without relying on complicated software tools or professional services. This is a new approach to enterprise business analytics that combines all of the required components into one easy-to-use BI application. Goel is the chairman of this six-person operation. ?We have no sales team. We are hiring re-sellers for our products. Companies we are talking to are high valuation companies.?

Another interesting company is Prolacta Bioscience products. Prolacta Bioscience has developed a human milk fortifier product made from concentrated, pasteurised human donor milk. This is meant for premature babies who are not able to consume enough of mother?s milk to get the necessary calories. After the initial struggle, when one of the pediatric journals said this is an effective product, business looked up. Abbot Labs will market and distribute the product. ?We are now cash flow positive,? says Goel.

But not all of his investments have been good decisions. When Goel got into setting up photovoltaic plants in Germany ($100 million investment), he didn?t know what a disaster it was going to turn out to be. The euro zone crisis and the Chinese dropping the price of PV panels made the project unviable, and it had to be shut down. ?It was a painful experience, but I salvaged something for myself. I will no longer invest in manufacture of electricity, but in distribution.? Now he is experimenting with small hydro projects in India, which he plans to scale up.

But what really makes him light up is the Foundation. It started with a lot of professionals based in the US feeling passionate about education and mentoring bright youngsters in India. They all networked to source such children. Their friends and family would study academic and financial data to shortlist students and vouch for them.

Students are chosen from the top 15% of those leaving school and who could not afford to go to college, and those who have got admission in professional colleges but cannot afford to go there. ?Till recently, the leadership came from the US and the administration was done from India. Now we have created an Indian board, which is effective.? Goel believes that India should be able to generate funds as well. Last year, R40 lakh was raised here. In the earlier years it was difficult to find students. Now the Foundation needs more funds in spite of raising $800,000 last year! ?I find this work outside business stimulating and very satisfying. The gift of education is the most lasting.?

Goel enjoys skiing and scuba diving, besides relaxing with his grandchildren.