Even before the rise of Indian IT giants like Infosys from their start-up phase in early 80?s, the private entrepreneurship of Indian IT owes a lot to Kanwal Rekhi for his showcasing the world what Indian engineers could do in Silicon Valley of the US.
Notable for his stint as the past chairman of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) and mentor of the Microsoft Hotmail famed joint-founder Sabeer Bhatia, Rekhi co-founded Excelan in 1982, a chip design technology company, manufacturing smart Ethernet cards, touted as big achievement of India?s tech entrepreneurship in the US in the late 70?s and 80?s.
Addressing a group of IT entrepreneurs at the TiE and Madras Management Association held recently here, he said: ?In 60?s and 70?s, Indian engineers were considered to be good in Math and Science and were considered to be good designers and code writers capable of working in high technology areas. The Silicon Valley had little or no faith in the entrepreneurial abilities of the Indian tribe. It was very hard to convince them that we could design and sell new products in the complex world of IT market?.
It was the time when companies like Intel, Xerox and Blue Book mulled on launching ethernet chips with their specifications enabling computer to computer networking in a span of 4-5 years at the market. ?Being an IIT electrical engineer from IIT Kharagpur, it stirred me that ethernet chips could be designed in a much shorter frame of time as against the time period set by the big corporations. I started to build the prototype and demonstrated it to a bunch of venture capitalists at the Valley who were quick to quiz me whether I could sell what I had designed in the market. I proved it so as Ethernet-based smart cards were based on TCP/IP protocol evolved by the US department of defence for their military network methodizing how computers would communicate among one another based on standard set of rules. The product kept evolving, I became the CEO of Excelan followed by company going public with its IPO on the Wall Street. In late 90?s, we had some 20 Indian entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley?.
?In early 70?s, we had spacemission, Veitnam war and I had three lay-offs in my career before my plunge into Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. The notion of employee loyalty is silly. People get hired and fired according to cyclical booms and busts in economy. Entrepreneurship is even tougher lonely journey where people have to constantly learn both survival and core skills, but the pursuit comes with pay-offs for life, he added.
?There are lots of opportunities in India to be a self-made personality, which Americans emphatically praise of a smart and successful entrepreneurship in their country?, he said.