This article was published in  August 2014 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Wednesday, August 06, 2014 

We have heard the phrase "connecting dots". Think of it as a metaphor for taking obscure and non-obvious signals in life and making something meaningful from it. I often find myself looking back on the events that occurred by chance or otherwise in my own journey and try to connect dots from various sources of knowledge, experiences, observations and reflections. I believe that the human beings already have these connection points incorporating intelligence, wisdom, skills, and strong desire innately ingrained in them. The key aspect is this unique ability to use their intuition not only to know that they exist but know what to do with them to continuously grow. Create innovations of value. Begin new initiatives whether you work for a company or embarking on a new venture. This is what all successful people like Steve Jobs used very successfully in every aspect of their life i.e., intuition to connect dots of opportunity that no one else could foresee. For instance, in my own journey to BITS, Pilani to graduate school in US to Silicon Valley on hindsight was one dot leading to the next one. I feel that perhaps there was a particular reason for all these to occur. As you similarly delve deeper into your own past events, you may find that some patterns may begin to emerge from it leading all these dots to possibly connect in your future. Connecting dots for entrepreneurs or someone pursuing new ventures is even more significant. 

As you connect the dots in your life, here is a beautiful and insightful quote from Steve Job\'s Stanford University commencement speech in 2005 to keep in mind, \"You can\'t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.\" 

While you begin to reflect on your life events, here are four key take away (4KTA) points based upon my experiences in connecting dots that you may find useful. 

1. Recognize 

The key element is to find, recognize and perceive patterns among seemingly scattered and unrelated events from your experiences, knowledge of current trends, and even observations in unrelated fields. It\'s your unique ability and intuition to connect them readily than others who are also exposed to the similar trends. Having an existing background in technology and experience in the pertinent market can help you readily recognize opportunities arising from the changes in technology and enable you to better spot risks and market opportunities. These can give impetus to new product ideas or services for your startup. For instance, the ability to spot eroding prices in networking hardware and advances in software technology helped many startups few years back to recognize opportunity in software defined networking market. Using cheap commodity hardware and intelligence of software could drive cost reduction, improve performance, scalability and enable efficient infrastructure. Similarly, by leveraging its innovative virtualization technology, VMware turned itself into a market leader in a short period of time by providing compute cost, performance and efficiency to IT departments in enterprises globally.

2. Cultivate 

Now how do you cultivate this ability to be more successful and proficient in identifying opportunities? What is it required for anyone to connect these dots and not only be alert to spot the opportunities and also search for them in the best ways and in most relevant places? You can cultivate by focusing your efforts on identifying changes in technology, market trends, demographical changes and other external factors that play a key role in making any organization successful. Focus on figuring out ways in which these trends and changes are connected. Look for emerging patterns. Connect as many dots as you can on a daily basis. Keep pondering. Be alert and be courageous enough to keep searching for these dots. This is a key step in the process of identifying new business opportunities. Expose yourself to a wide range of business opportunities that may vary greatly. The richer the exposure and observations in your memory, the more effective you may become in comparing newly encountered events or stimuli to identify emerging opportunities.

3. Trust 

We have heard it quite often, \"Think big\". Make a difference and have a higher purpose to serve the humanity. Have an impact in everything you do every day for the betterment of a healthier whole. The point is that your higher purpose should be so inspiring that people want to join you voluntarily to turn it into a reality. They can help you navigate in the face of tremendous adversity that you may encounter. Every startup goes through its cycle of ups and downs before it can create wealth and opportunities for everyone involved. Have complete faith and trust in you. Trust your instincts. Develop an ability to pay extra attention to your intuition. Your inner confidence must exude from you. Your team should feel it as they become part of your vision and share and help you advance it rapidly.

4. Act

As you continue to develop the sensory pattern recognition abilities and the ability to \"connect the dots\" to identify new opportunities, it becomes crucial for you to comprehend that without acting upon these intuitions, you would never know how the final result would be. You must have the mindset and attitude of an entrepreneur to translate these intuitions into action. Embrace your risk-taking and innovative traits by turning these ideas resulting from connecting dots into a profitable business opportunity. This is how you can convert your ideas and visions into creating products and services that help improve and enhance the lives of others. Continue to improve your ability and intuitive skills with the right environment, skills, knowledge and training to foster the right mindset. Focus completely on bringing yourself that much closer to reaching your dreams and infusing life into your entrepreneurial ventures.

In summary, the four key take away points for connecting the dots are ability to recognize patterns in dots, cultivate ability to identify opportunities, ability to trust your instincts and act on those to turn them into successful ventures. 

The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC., a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair – Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization, based in Silicon Valley, CA. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

Date:   Friday, July 04, 2014 

While I was pondering over the word "Success" in last few weeks, I realized due to its significance and its widespread use, I must delve deeper on this. Success implies different things to different people. What does it really mean from an entrepreneur's perspective? How do you know when you have achieved success? What does it take you to get there? Do you ever wonder about it in the way Eckhart Tolle addresses it in his book – A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life\'s Purpose, that the basis for your true success is, "Finding and living in alignment with the inner purpose is the foundation of your outer purpose that can also change over time". 

As we know that every dream will be challenged since a dream or goal rarely comes true easily and effortlessly, without delays, problems or hurdles. Now being an entrepreneur and optimistic by nature, I ignore these statements. Entrepreneur within you must find a way to overcome these bumps on your road to success. The bigger your dreams, the tougher your challenge, the more ambitious your goals, the more likely it is that you will need to find creative ways to tackle them. A lot depends upon your attitude, experience, skills, network and lucky stars. While you begin to reflect on it, here are four key take away (4KTA) points based upon my own experiences, insights and observations at this point in my life. It won\'t surprise me if they change in next ten years while I accumulate new learning, new lessons and new experiences from my continued entrepreneurial journey.

1. Meaning 

It is critical to recognize and understand what success means to you as an entrepreneur. Success can show up in many forms. For many of you, it may mean creating many jobs, making lots of money or having opportunities to do things you really enjoy. Many entrepreneurs find a gap in market with a niche product. A large company then ends up acquiring the startup for strategic reasons. This is success for them. For instance, my security software company ended up being bought by Novell within three years of our founding it - a great outcome for us for three years of hard work and efforts. Many entrepreneurs define success that serves a higher need to help humanity at large. For instance, Elon Musk felt that he wanted to focus in areas that can help humanity at a huge scale after selling PayPal. He concentrated on three areas – electric car, solar power, and space transportation. If you dig deeper, you will find that many entrepreneurs don\'t do it just for the money alone. While there are significant financial motives, we know well that the odds of success are low so it just can\'t be driven by money. One primary motivation is by pursuing something that was deemed impossible by everyone and also turning your dream into commercial reality. This is another definition of success as you can\'t imagine doing anything else. So make sure to get a clear understanding of how you define success for yourself.

2. Toiling 

Now once you have defined success, identify what efforts it would require. Define clearly how you will measure it. How much and how long you will be toiling over it. For instance, once you have identified and validated a market opportunity for your technology and solution, a thorough understanding of requirements in terms of people, process, product, technology and funding to turn your initial concept into a commercial success is a key. The efforts will mean tackling all hurdles, obstacles and challenges happily in all these areas as you face them along the way. Additionally, it may require solving customer pain points in innovative and inexpensive ways that have never been done before. Challenge yourself to think hard on the meaning of success for you. Think differently and clearly on efforts involved to make it happen and finally, monitoring and measuring it. 

3. Evolving 

This is an important element of success. What success may mean to you in your early stage of your career may be entirely different than what it may mean after you have achieved it. You may find your thinking to continually evolve as the meaning of success changes for you. It could mean something as simple as having the biggest impact with your value add and skill sets to your customers or to your family or to anything that you feel is important in the sphere of your life now. It may mean doing something that can have profound impact on human beings globally. For instance, Bill Gates focused passionately in growing Microsoft in early part of his life. Now he is mostly focused on his foundation to do good for humanity at mega scale. This is an inspiring example of how success may have changed meaning for him over the years. As you will notice, one common theme in his focus is reaching out and having a profound impact on as many human beings as possible globally.

4. Enjoying

Here is an excellent quote that clearly articulates this element. \"Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won\'t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can\'t.\" This brings up another vital point that success is about the journey. Entrepreneurs are always looking to the next challenge to conquer. Our brain cells are constantly itching to go beyond what we have already accomplished. For instance, as an entrepreneur and startup advisor, now I pay close attention to the fact that I am being mindful, being alert, soaking in all the information and continuing to learn from the team while really enjoying the process of our intellectual and entrepreneurial interaction regardless of the eventual outcome of the startup. It\'s immensely important that you are enjoying the journey of your entrepreneurial creation during every moment of its progress. This way you may find yourself truly the happiest while really feeling the meaning of true success. Here is a relevant quote from Sir Richard Branson that summarizes this so well, \"My definition of success? The more you\'re actively and practically engaged, the more successful you will feel.\" 

In summary, the four key take away points on success are around the concept of meaning, toiling, evolving and enjoying the journey. 



The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC., a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair – Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization, based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

This article was published in  June 2014 issue of SiliconIndia.


Date:   Monday, June 02, 2014 

The topic is timely as we just finished TiEcon 2014, the largest Entrepreneurship Conference in the world at Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. The Tag line for the conference this year was Learn, Connect and Prosper. As we all professionals know, connecting or networking is critical to growing your business. If you do not go out and meet people, nobody will know you exist. If they don\'t know you exist, they cannot hire you or use your services. Now, you can be the best networker out there but unless you follow up with the people you meet, you are letting go of some future opportunities that may arise from it. Connecting with other like-minded fellow entrepreneurs is as critical as learning and prospering. Without a sincere follow up to create another opportunity to interact, a relationship can never develop. You must be proactive and diligent in connecting with people you meet. This can set you apart from the vast majority. The appropriate and sincere follow up may ultimately lead to meaningful and fruitful relationships and also send a message that you are serious towards developing a relationship. The follow up process is more of an art than science and hence, there is no single best way. If you want to develop a mutually beneficial relationship, you have to take action immediately. Now as you begin to think about developing these new connections into long term relationships, here are four key take away (4KTA) points based upon my own experiences, insights and observations. 

1. Organize – The first step would be organizing the new contacts that you have made into various categories and prioritizing them from high to low. Review all the business cards by priority that you have assigned. The high priority ones should be contacted within one or two days of initial meeting followed by next priority list consisting of those that you want to contact within a week and remaining after few weeks. Establish a goal for the follow up. It could be like getting a face to face meeting, suggesting someone or something that may benefit them or someone they may want to meet or even requesting to send relevant information or extending an invite for coffee or lunch. Always think from the value you are going to provide to your contact than other way round. Make it a win-win goal. Be sure to highlight this as a way to get to know each other\'s businesses and goals, and uncover ways you might be able to complement each other. The goal is to ensure that the other person will feel there is something of value in it for them.

2. Initiate – Now your follow up must be creative and sincere. Always work on making yourself memorable and project yourself in positive light. While following up, reference a part of your conversation that you had with the person that was funny but not off-color or remind of something that person told you about from his or her life. Send an article that is a good follow up to most of your conversations that represent what you do and is of value to your contact. This must not be a sales brochure. Making it personal will help you build rapport and create the connection. It will also convey the fact that you were actually listening and interested in that person. Indicate your goal into the follow up communication and your desired outcome. Write out and read your intended message before you call, mail or email so you leave a positive impression. For voicemail, it may be worthwhile to practice out loud. 

3. Approach – With all kinds of social media tools these days and handwritten notes or letters almost becoming extinct, my suggestion is to be as different as you can. That\'s why many experts still recommend sending handwritten notes in mail. They will certainly portray your personality and your keen desire to invest time and efforts in fostering a relationship. You may want to use this as first choice for your highest priority contacts. However, in practice, it may be easier to send emails, use LinkedIn to send a short note and connect and finally, even phone and text could be used as your last option. Using voicemail can convey your taking time to call and then leaving a message in a positive tone with warmth and high energy can leave a memorable impression. Make sure you smile and are in a good mood as your voice will reflect your state of mind. While emailing, craft a clear and attention grabbing subject line. As they say, subject line is what opens your email and read by your audience. You can combine an email with a voicemail or even a handwritten note. 

4. Respect – Not everyone will reciprocate and respond to your follow up attempts as some of them may not see the value in fostering a relationship. Try couple of times and after that, let it pass as opportunity may cross paths again. At some point, being persistent can almost turn into annoyance and aggravation for the recipient, so you may want to apply sound discretion when to stop following up. Also, you must note that reaching out one time after meeting them is not enough. There is a saying in sales that it usually takes seven or eight meetings before someone decides that they are ready to engage with you. You need to find a way to touch base with them regularly. Continue to give information of value and interest to them. When you follow up regularly and share information of value after meeting someone, you become someone they trust. You will naturally build a solid relationship and before you know it the cards on your desk will become your best customers, partners or possibly even good friends.

In summary, the four key take away points are organize, initiate, approach and respect for doing an appropriate and sincere follow up to form meaningful and lasting relationships.



The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC., a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization, based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.comand follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

This article was published in  May 2014 issue of SiliconIndia.


Date:   Thursday, May 01, 2014 


Having started my entrepreneurial life as a software services entrepreneur, I faced this dilemma whether to transition myself into a software product entrepreneur or stay with services business. In my experience, entrepreneurs with product experiences usually do not find it challenging to grow software services businesses. As you delve deeper down inside the soul of an entrepreneur, I believe its this strong desire to build that magical software that sells millions of copies or has millions of customers using it via Software as a Service (SaaS) business model nowadays. It does not further help when you see these categories of companies enjoying multiple times enterprise value compared to a software services company and churning out high gross margins due to lower cost of delivering the software. The main difference being developing custom software a customer by Service Company vs. making re-usable software by the product company. The latter one is more risk prone though with a much higher upside potential. The revenues can sky rocket if the product is adopted by customers rapidly. In general, its an uphill battle for a service company to switch to a product company. As you begin to think about going into that direction, here are four key take away (4KTA) points based upon my own experiences. 

1.What, Why and How 
The key question to ask yourself is what it is that you would like to develop. Why do you feel that this is a rare market opportunity that you feel passionate about? How are you going to develop and how will you find resources and capital required? Now, when I founded Ukiah Software, Inc. to develop security software, the idea came to us while this euphoria for the internet to be the next big thing was already set in motion. My co-founder and I began brainstorming about all possible pain points and hence, came up with the idea of providing secure access and optimized bandwidth to internet users. We were convinced that this was a huge opportunity. As we got seed funding, I decided to focus fully on this product company and began to wind down my services company started two years earlier. Not only I was really excited about this opportunity but also, had clarity of our mission. Now to execute on this great idea, initially I used partial investment from the profits coming from the software services business as well as creatively leveraging few employees from services business to work part time on developing prototype of initial concept. Luckily, it led to several award winning Ukiah products, NetRoad FireWALL and NetRoad TrafficWARE etc. barely within couple of years since inception. Developing a product can be very risky in many dimensions like lack of customer adoption, need for higher capital, different skillsets than your team has and many others. Many entrepreneurs choose to invest using their own savings. This shows their strong faith in it. You need to be aware of risk with this approach. 

2.Investor Perspective 
In general, software product companies raise money from investors quite early on. Investors want full commitment, focus and assurance that you are sincerely protecting their investments. The typical investor belief is that software services are not scalable and the market will not reward for services revenue. It wont attract the premium enterprise value compared to a product company. Scaling a services business has its own challenges. You can only scale linearly in proportion to the number of people serving the clients. Now, a product company incurs lots of investment upfront. If successful, it can, however, deliver exponential results that can grow rapidly. Many experienced investors understand that great products do not just roll themselves out. You need to implement them. This often means integrating with other existing products per specific customer needs, providing training and monitoring usage to encourage adoption. It is key to remember that until sales volume is sufficiently large, no third party system integrators are going to commit resources to making you successful. Each project should be related to rolling out your solution and include only software installation, training, rollout support, integration, configuration and optimization. Savvy investors when explained this understand and appreciate that your focus is to ensure that customer has a delightful experience. I highly recommend getting venture investors. Some VCs are really smart and have huge networks. By partnering with right VCs, you can benefit immensely as they push you to become better and beyond your own limits to a significantly higher level. 

3.Intellectual Property 
When you are doing custom software development, customers typically own the resulting intellectual property. Without customer authorization, you do not have a product to sell as you can\'t reuse or resell that code. Another challenge is usually the project and pertinent use case is customer specific and is of no use on a broader scale. My experience is that it can be challenging to turn a custom development project into a product. 

4.Focus, Team and Trade offs
Focus, Focus, and Focus! You need to single mindedly pursue the path once chosen. Use minimal amount of money to get the prototype ready. Test the water with customers and investors to get feedback early on for its usability, market potential and acceptance. Make changes per relevant feedback. Remember the team you need for a software services company is good at doing custom programming jobs, whereas the team you would hire for a products company is good at creating working software and meeting a release date. There are a series of other tradeoffs when developing a software product. The development team must be highly talented and insightful at making the choices that are optimal for creating a packaged product. There is low risk involved in software services business as you get paid based on hours spent or milestones reached. Once you have completed the work, you are going to get paid. When you try to switch to a products company, the financial needs of the company change dramatically and there is upfront investment needed.

In summary, the four key take away points are knowing what, why and how, understanding investor\'s perspective, understanding intellectual property rights and understanding where to focus, what kind of team to have and what tradeoffs are involved. 

The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC., a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization, based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.comand follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

Date:   Friday , March 07, 2014

Isn\'t it really surprising that the largest industry in America, healthcare, has not generally been conducive to adopt entrepreneurship as readily as some other industries? Usually, the main barriers appear to be structural, economic, organizational, and behavioral. Despite this, many entrepreneurs in this industry toil for years raising tons of capital then go through a rigorous regulatory FDA process for approval only to find that the drug or their innovative medical device did not get approved. Many of them continue to persist. It is the sheer passion to help improve the lives of so many people affected by various diseases and relieve them of their agony is what keeps them going.

This article presents the wisdom from an amazingly successful entrepreneur from pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Sarvajna Dwivedi co-founded Pearl Therapeutics, Inc. with over 21 years of experience in various therapeutic classes, dosage forms, and devices from discovery to commercialization, to develop differentiated inhaled combinations for globally prevalent respiratory illnesses. Pearl raised $167.5M in venture financing and progressed a dual drug combination into Phase III clinical testing in less than six years. AstraZeneca acquired Pearl for $1.15B in June 2013. Here are his four key take away (4KTA) points based on my discussions with him recently.

1. Clear Focus on Value:

Never lose sight of the value of your product, service or plan. It\'s the mission you stay focused on. For us, the mission was to help millions of patients breathe better than current products. The value of improving patient\'s health even during the difficult times in our company kept us focused on our mission. The lead product was a combination of two drugs that enables patients to open up airways to help breathe better. Against the prevailing wisdom of making once daily products, we chose to make twice daily drug combination because patients feel worst in the morning and in the evening. The major pharmaceutical companies were trying to develop once daily drug to improve compliance, so patients don\'t miss the dose a day. We focused, instead, on medical value inherent in relieving symptoms, rather than forcing patients to comply with dosing regimens. It was this clarity that led to some excellent clinical studies and support of major investors including positive feedback from expert physicians in this therapeutic area. With AstraZeneca, our company is poised to build a whole pipeline that mirrors patient symptoms. A clear focus on medical value creation at Pearl lead to a huge success for our investors.

2. Build A Strong Team Early On:

My cofounder and I clearly knew our strengths and weaknesses. We complemented our weaknesses by hiring experts with deepest knowledge and experience. Pearl\'s leadership team was formed early to create a strong pharmaceutical company in small construct. Our execution was flawless, completely on target, and on budget at every step. As a result, we were able to raise huge financings despite the tough economy, and continued to build escalating value for the patients and for shareholders with each annual plan. We rewarded our team commensurate with industry standards while providing them opportunity to work on an exciting range of products. This resulted in retaining them despite a number of uncertainties. Knowing the health value you are providing and finding a team to execute on it is ultimately critical to your success.

3. Daily Sense of Urgency:

We equated time with money. When you raise venture money, it is depleted on a daily basis with no product revenue stream compensating for it. In pharmaceutical business, timelines are long, and capital required is huge, with stringent regulatory requirements. It is easy to lose sight when the company is especially so young, and investors seek results and positive outcomes on a recurrent basis. We decided to focus on a daily burn rate, and return on investment metrics. All of our employees were aware of the burn rate on a daily basis that helped instill a sense of urgency in all timeline planning and day to day execution. Even after the acquisition by AstraZeneca, that sense of urgency is still the hallmark of our team, and the products are poised to reach patients in one of the fastest progress of pipelines in respiratory business. As it is apparent, the focus on daily burn results in creating a daily sense of urgency, eventually leading to cumulatively building customer value and financial success.

4. Product Passion:

The journey of Pearl Therapeutics appears to be easy in retrospect. This was far from true. We ran into serious technical and economic challenges within twelve months of inception, both occurring at the same time. The core technology licensed by us was yielding unstable products. When we discovered this problem, approximately 1/3rd of the total money raised was already spent. We had every opportunity to curtail our operational focus, and even change the direction of the company, but we did not. We clearly believed in our mission. We were passionate about it. We felt strongly in bringing breathing relief to millions of patients and improving their lives globally with our first product. We could envision that elderly patients now could get out of the bed, play with their grandkids, and walk to their neighborhood stores. We solved the technical problem rather than giving up on it due to our innate passion in helping so many patients suffering from respiratory related problems. The new solution led to brand new intellectual property protecting the products for longer duration than licensed technology would have due to earlier expiration of their patent life. As we overcame this technical challenge, the economy took a nose dive in 2008-2009 periods. Now, with a brand new technology and promise of new product, we were still able to raise next huge round of financing - the largest pharmaceutical financing round for a private company in 2011 despite a shaky market. The bottom line is if it were not for team\'s innate passion, strong medical value and deep technical expertise, this would not be possible.

In summary, the four key take away points for any aspiring pharmaceutical entrepreneur is to focus on providing clear value, building a strong team early on, instilling a daily sense of urgency and having a true product passion. 


Naveen Bisht is Co-Founder of Auriss Technologies, Inc, a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair- Programs, Chair Content -TiEcon 2013 and TiEcon 2014, The Indus Entrepreneur(TiE), based in Silicon Valley, California. Follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA 

Date:   Wednesday , February 05, 2014

Have you ever wondered what makes Silicon Valley tick? So many countries around the world have tried to replicate it but there is no other place like Silicon Valley that has made such an enormous impact in the society and our day to day lives. Many books have been written about the entrepreneurial and innovative ecosystem that exists here between angel investors, venture capital, risk-taking entrepreneurs, law firms and immigrants who are hungry and ready to make a mark.

This month\'s article brings to you a highly generous entrepreneur who incorporates most of the pieces that make up the Silicon Valley puzzle. This is how Mike Cassidy characterized him in a San Jose Mercury News article last year. Vish Mishra is a technology entrepreneur-turned-executive and now a VC for past 12 years with Clearstone Venture Partners � a VC fund with nearly $700 Million in committed capital. Clearstone has been quite successful as an early stage investor in PayPal (eBay), Overture (Yahoo!), Kazeon (EMC), Integrien (VMware), Ankeena (Juniper), The Rubicon Project, BillDesk (India), United Online, and Vast. A Silicon Valley veteran, Vish has over thirty years of leadership and management experience including CEO and Director of several companies. He was co-founder of Excelan (1983) acquired by Novell for $225 million; a founder and board member of Telera, a voice web infrastructure company sold to Alcatel for $140 million. A past president of TiE Silicon Valley, he has actively dedicated himself to its growth since its inception. I have the distinct pleasure of knowing Vish for many years including during the time we served together on TiE Board. It is with special gratitude to him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points, which center around the concept of four dimensions of entrepreneurship, based on my discussions with him recently.

1.Know Thyself!

If you want to start a company, you must know what you are truly good at. You must feel comfortable under your skin. For instance, are you a technologist or are you a marketing expert? It helps others to collaborate and work with you. People do not change. Your personality is developed during your teenage years. The rest of your life goes towards learning survival mechanisms. I realized early on that I enjoyed helping others whether it was helping my classmates with their homework or whether giving my colleagues new contacts or advice. In my first job at Control Data, I started as a design engineer in the communications division for re-designing recently introduced product in the market, so I could extract efficiency and reduce cost further. The hardest problem in my job was to get a solid grasp of the customer�s reported problems. So, I started holding meetings with members from marketing, sales, and customer support and product groups to get to the heart of problems amidst hide-bound personalities. As a result of my collaborative and helping nature like a peacemaker, I was moved into management and leadership role early on in my career.

2. Know Your Market

Who is your customer? Is your customer going to buy your product? Do you understand your customer\'s problems well enough that you can build a solution around it? Can you bring the product to market in a timely manner and get instant customer feedback? Make sure you have the pertinent domain expertise in this area to build the best product. Just because social media is a hot trend does not mean you start a company in that area, when, in fact, your expertise is in semiconductors. For example, recently in Ankeena Networks - a portfolio company, two of the co-founders Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan, came up with an innovative idea for video caching. Before they got started, they talked to over 30 customers to validate the idea and fine tune it to what the precise need was. The company was successfully acquired within 18 months by Juniper Networks. In a healthcare software startup, Quantros, the entrepreneur - a medical doctor wanted to take on the whole healthcare market of payers, providers and drug manufacturers. After entering all three markets, he decided to focus on providers only with a patient safety and risk management solution. With this focus the company became a market leader and was successfully acquired by a private equity firm.

3.Build The Right Product

Entrepreneurs should build a point product rather than a platform. It�s way hard for a startup to sell a platform solution. In the eco-system of your expertise, find one thing that is really broken and develop a solution to fix that. Make sure that it fits into the existing ecosystem and solves one particular customer pain point. For instance, Telera started with an idea to make 1-800 numbers appear as local numbers. It could potentially provide huge savings in long distance calling costs to businesses. Now, in order to make it a reality, we had to build a dedicated network operations center (NOC) to act as a neutral party among various carriers. To accomplish this, we ended up building whole voice over IP infrastructure management software, which became a valuable piece of intellectual property that led to company�s acquisition eventually by Alcatel.

4. Generate Profit

You must focus on generating profit as soon as possible otherwise stay away from becoming an entrepreneur. Every business has to make a profit in order to sustain itself. Profit orientation means recognizing that the business comes first. The cost of goods always needs to be less than the sale price. Hire the right people with the similar mindset. Act fast enough to replace the wrong people.

In summary, the four key take away points for entrepreneur\'s are knowing thyself, knowing your market, building the right product and generating profit.

Naveen Bisht is Co-Founder of Auriss Technologies, Inc, a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair- Programs, Chair Content -TiEcon 2013 and TiEcon 2014, The Indus Entrepreneur(TiE), based in Silicon Valley, California. Follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA 

This article was published in Janurary 2014 issue of SiliconIndia. 

Date:   Thursday, January 02, 2014 

Time flies so fast, doesn’t it? We have just finished twelve fabulous months of 2013. And, here we are at the start of a new year - full of new hopes, new dreams, new resolutions and a new beginning. My best wishes for a massive success to you all entrepreneurs out there whether you are still contemplating to get out of your comfortable day to day boring job or taking the first step to realize your dreams you had as a kid or you are already in the midst of your entrepreneurial journey in this beautiful planet. This is an opportune time to focus on one critical element beneficial in many ways for any entrepreneur i.e., volunteering. It is about giving your precious time, energy and skills to help others with no financial gain to you. Volunteering is generally considered an altruistic activity and is intended to promote good or improve human quality of life. Similarly, an entrepreneur strives to not only improve his but also, human quality of life. The net result is lots of good karma energy flowing outwards. Here are four key take away (4KTA) points. 

1. Sense of Achievement – Fundamentally, as a volunteer you help without expecting anything in return. For an entrepreneur, despite long hours of work, volunteering can lead to a greater sense of achievement. Granted that no one person can solve all worlds’ problems, but what you do can make it a bit better. As the saying goes, do something good for others, something good will happen to you. This is my key guiding mantra for volunteering work at The Indus Entrepreneur Silicon Valley (TiE) for last four years in positions including Board Member, Chair, Programs; Content Chair, TiECon 2013 – world’s largest annual conference for entrepreneurs, and now, for TiECon 2014. I began volunteering for TiE’s activities since first TIECon in 1994. However, the idea of becoming a more active volunteer arose after my second startup Nayna Networks took me through whirl-wind of a ride during the telecom burst of early 2000s taking me through so many highs and lows. I felt that by volunteering for a non-profit organization with a mission around entrepreneurship that I am passionate about, not only it could help me channel out some of my stressful energies, but also, get me back into my natural flow. As a result, tons of positive energy could flow back to me and at the same time, I could help out with my loads of entrepreneurial experiences. In past few years, I have been able to create and launch many new successful programs such as My Story, Startup Pitchfest, TiE Angels and awesome TiECon 2013 conference together with many talented and like-minded volunteers.

2. New Experiences and Connections – Quite often, first thing we human beings consider is what’s in it for me. Instead, if you take the view what I can do to help to advance the cause of this organization; it can result in rewards to you in myriad ways that may be unfathomable to you early on. Volunteering offers an incredible networking opportunity and new experiences. You develop lasting personal and professional relationships. It is also a great way to learn about people from all walks of life, different environments, and new industries. For instance, by being an active volunteer at TIE, I have been able to meet not only early investors, strategic partners but also, find co-founders and customers for my startups. I met our first angel investor for my company Ukiah Software at TiECon 1996. My co-founder for Nayna Networks met me at one of the TiE events. Similarly, few years ago, I met an amazing entrepreneur, who asked me to help him as an advisor, for his solar micro-inverter company. I saw not only the potential and hunger in him but also, his keen desire to seek advice and openness to listening to new ideas. His company was successfully acquired by a multi-billion dollar company recently. I really enjoyed working with him in helping refine his business strategy, make new introductions as and when needed, and act as his unbiased coach all the way through acquisition process. Basically, you can never tell who you will meet or what new information you will learn and what impact this could have on your life. 

3. Social and Relationship Skills – Typically, high-tech entrepreneurs are technical people. Engineers as a nature are quite shy and have a hard time meeting new people. Volunteering gives you the opportunity to practice and develop your social skills, since you are meeting regularly with a group of people with common interests. For instance, if you become member of TiE organization, you have so many events and opportunities for meeting like-minded folks, who could complement you with your skillsets. Also, listening to some of these successful entrepreneurs, who started as engineers just like you and me at one time, can provide a huge boost to your inner confidence and serve as role models. Once you have momentum, it’s easier to branch out and make more friends and contacts.

4. Spirit of Samaj Seva (Community Service) – Samaj Seva in Hindi means community service. Every company we start as entrepreneur is nothing but a collection of human beings. No man or woman is an island. It is easy to take for granted the community that we live in. People and societies co-depend on each other for survival. It is immensely significant that by getting involved early on and volunteering your time can help the society at large. For instance, I volunteered to create and write this monthly column after Christo Jacob, Managing Editor, had approached me to write an article in 2011, as a way to share mine and other successful entrepreneur’s lessons that could be widely beneficial for all aspiring entrepreneurs. Volunteering is ultimately about helping others and having an impact on people’s well-being. There is no other better way to connect with your community and give a little back to enhance the lives of people around. As a result, you certainly return to society some of the benefits that society gives you. At the end of day, you feel awesome!

In summary, the four key take away points for an entrepreneur by volunteering are feeling a sense of achievement, enjoying new experiences and connections, enhancing social and relationship skills and being part of this amazing human spirit of Samaj Seva. 

Naveen Bisht is Co-Founder of Auriss Technologies, Inc, a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair- Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur(TiE), based in Silicon Valley, California.

This article was published in  December 2013 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Wednesday, December 1, 2013 

This month's article brings you lessons from Raj Parekh, an extraordinary entrepreneur, prolific angel investor, intrapreneur and co-founder of several companies. Raj is currently President and CEO of CloudVolumes, a virtualization and cloud computing company. Previously, he co-founded Virident Systems, storage class memory with highest performance Flash company in 2006 and managed as CEO/Chairman till 2012; co-founded and managing Redwood Venture Partners since 1998, a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley and Comstaller ($150M hi-tech incubator) in 2000. Redwood and its affiliated partnerships have raised funds representing over $250 million in invested capital in over 30 high tech companies. Raj has served as Board Member or as Chairman of the Board of over 15 high tech companies, including Magma (now Synopsis), Niksun, Pranalytica, eGtran, Virident, CloudVolumes, TiE Angels, PubNub and Aspex. Raj was member of the senior business and technology executive teams of several high technology companies known for his leadership and vision. He served at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) as CTO and Executive Vice President of Engineering of all system products, and as VP and General Manager of Java Products for Sun Microsystems Microelectronics. Before joining Sun, Raj was Vice President and General Manager with Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) managed all chip development including "Geometry Engine" and several system products. With special gratitude to him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points, which center around the concept of morphing based on my discussions with him recently. Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that changes (or morphs) one image into another through a seamless transition. Similarly, creating success out of any entrepreneurial project entails morphing your company and yourself from one stage to next stage.

1. Continuous Learning - This concept of morphing occurred to me while working in various engineering roles in early stages of my career. I started my career in semiconductor process field making essentially resistivity, thickness and threshold parameters. Realizing early on that design engineers were not taking full advantage of my work, I morphed myself into designing integrated circuits. After some time, I decided to morph myself into a hardware engineer to ensure that system engineers took full advantage of the capabilities that I designed. Subsequently, I morphed myself into systems engineering role, than networking and storage and now cloud. This is continuous morphing of oneself to bring out the best solution instead of micro-optimization into any one particular product area.

2. Morphing Ideas and Products - Quite often, good engineering folks, when promoted into management roles turn out to be bad managers as they are unable to morph fully into what they are expected to do. Instead, they continue to act like super engineers rather than acting like a leader. For instance, as people get promoted higher and higher into an organization, it is easy to become arrogant whereas higher and higher you climb the ladder, humbler and humbler you need to become since you know less and need to manage more and more. For example, at Silicon Graphics, initially we started out with building graphics terminals and realized quickly that we needed to morph ourselves into a fully functional graphics workstation solutions provider. We realized that it is time to morph not only product but also engineering team. I had an opportunity to witness amazing transition; even today most of the employees will tell you SGI was the best company they worked for. 

3. People Morphing - Typically a startup CEO is not the best IPO or big exit CEO, and so are VP of engineering and marketing and sales and more. Do not assume every one will be able to morph to next level. Identifying who does and who does not; when to make a change; replace or re-assign, while still keeping core team in place is critical. To accomplish people morphing, the best solution I found was to have few good advisors, not one who got lucky but one who had success in good time and bad since they themselves had morphed. Next, you need to manage conflicts. On one hand, you really want to believe in your product and your direction. On the other hand, you need to adapt to a changing market condition. There needs to be fine balance between being flexible and being focused at the same time. Nine out of ten times, you need to remain focused on what you are doing and your eyes need to be open for one opportunity that could morph you to a higher level. As an entrepreneur, you also need to be intellectually honest about when to call it quits or transition into a different and perhaps, even smaller role or even step down for the benefit of the company. For instance, one of our companies had an opportunity to go public at $900 Million market capitalization. The CEO was adamant on getting $1 Billion dollar market cap. The market suddenly changed in 2001 forcing the company to file for bankruptcy. The key take away is to morph yourself into being flexible and assessing an exit opportunity rapidly and grab it if it represents a fair value. 

4. Expecting the Unexpected - Every entrepreneur needs to be ready to expect the unexpected regardless of all the market analysis and customer validation. For instance, Virident system was founded to solve significantly improve search, caching and analysis and decided to use special kind of flash memory from a multi-billion dollar public company instead of generic flash. We made them as our partner, got over $10 Million investment from them. Additionally they invested $50 Million in their fab for us while we successfully developed and deployed the product. Customer list was fantastic; it felt like we were on top of the world! Unfortunately, the strategic partner filed for bankruptcy. Great product, perfect market, POs in hand, team in place but overnight no place to go, no product to sell, no cash in the bank, lots of bills to pay and nothing but sleepless nights for me as CEO. Fortunately, we successfully morphed the company into a storage-class memory company and recently, exited the company for over $680 Million. The key take away is that expect unexpected just in case everything you count on somehow does not work. 

In summary, the four key take away points for entrepreneurs are continuous learning, morphing ideas and products, people morphing, and being ready for expecting the unexpected.

Naveen Bisht is Co-Founder of Auriss Technologies, Inc, a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair- Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur(TiE), based in Silicon Valley, California.

This article was published in  October 2013 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Tuesday , October 01, 2013

This month’s article brings you an amazing story from an extraordinary entrepreneur, Martin Casado, Co-Founder and CTO of Nicira. Martin turned his Ph.D. research into creating a startup that not only pioneered the current trend in software defined networking but also, turned his company into a leader in network virtualization for open source initiatives. He and his team used his research at Stanford University for developing cutting edge technology for network virtualization revolution in data center and cloud networking. VMware acquired Nicira in middle of last year for approximately $1.05 billion in cash plus approximately $210 million of assumed unvested equity awards.

Today, Nicira is at the forefront of software-defined networking, which enables the dynamic creation of virtual network infrastructure and services that are completely decoupled and independent from the physical network hardware. Many industry leaders, including AT&T, DreamHost, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace are using the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) to accelerate service delivery from weeks to minutes and dramatically reduce complexity and cost. Nicira helps customers dramatically improve business velocity and efficiency by transforming how networking works in the Cloud era and the value to customers lies in their open approach and the richness of capabilities in network virtualization.
Prior to Nicira, Martin co-founded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006. Prior to attending Stanford, Martin held a research position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on network security in the information operations assurance center (IOAC). With special gratitude to him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points from his amazing and unique entrepreneurial journey based on my discussions with him recently.

1. Clear Direction – One of the early lessons I learnt was from our CEO Steve Mullaney, who used to quote, “Where you are.
Where you are going. What are your ultimate destination and the high fidelity? If you do not know where you are going, then you will get nowhere. So you better have your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.” Not having a direction, not having a goal, not knowing where you are going, it is all the same. You go nowhere. You can never get there because you do not really have a destination. Without direction, without a destination, without a goal, how do you pick a direction, choose a road, or plot a course to get to your ultimate destination. For instance, we wanted to be a software company and use VMWare’s V-Switch infrastructure and its networking functionalities.

It has a huge installed base of customers where we could insert our technology but were not sure initially how to get there but could answer most of the questions as outlined here. We wanted to change the operational model for networking. We knew how we wanted to do it; essentially by virtualizing the networking and using software only approach by inserting into V-Switch. We were convinced about the market opportunity, high fidelity and only thing left was focused execution by having the best team aligned towards shared goal and execution of our vision.

2. Good Narrative – You cannot underestimate the power of a good narrative. The companies are about affecting the behavior of its various constituencies such as VCs, customers, employees, partners and analysts. A clear articulation of what you are doing and why it matters is a key to creating a compelling and clear narrative. For instance, in our case while launching the company we worked very hard to distill the new technology into a simple story around transforming the networking. Similarly, having a clearly compelling and simple story that could narrate how our technology could transform the networking was quite instrumental during our fund raising initiatives, customer and analyst meetings.

3. Understanding Insertion and the Channel – For early stage companies, the sales and marketing channel is not only essential to successfully bringing products to market but is also an effective way to maximize sales and improve profitability. With the rapid growth of new channels such as e-commerce and new sales channels, an effective channel strategy is a key contributor to building and sustaining a competitive advantage during its growth phase. This becomes even more crucial for a start up with new technology. First key element for any new technology pioneer is to understand how you are going to insert your technology in a customer’s infrastructure and how it is going to be available i.e., as a software or an appliance or in some other form and finally, where exactly it will sit in the current customer infrastructure. The second element is to understand the right channel that will be effective, low cost and provide the maximum value. The maximum value implies your startup to get customers that will validate the technology and act as reference customers and rave about the transformation this new technology is bringing to their enterprise. We decided to focus on few larger companies instead of going down market. Having to insert into VAR/Reseller channel is an entirely different strategy and was not the right approach for our company. At the same time, building a large sales force and penetrating OEM partners are expensive, time consuming and risky for an early stage technology pioneer. We decided to focus on few large customers such as AT&T, NTT, eBay and Rackspace etc. In addition, our insertion was at V-Switch as networking was moving into edge and we did not have to deal with hardware.

4. Role of Partnering – As a startup, you need to really understand the pros and cons of partnering. Many large partners in early stages want you to become their contract engineers. It’s tempting to do that to get quick revenue than hold out on it. If what you are doing strategic in nature, then it becomes a build vs. buy decision for the partner. If partner can get away by getting the value at a low value, they will try to do that. It’s important to keep that perspective in mind and hence, avoid becoming contract engineering services company. Be really careful in choosing your strategic partners.

In summary, the four key take away points for entrepreneurs are having a clear direction, good narrative, understanding insertion and the channel and finally, role of partnering.

Naveen Bisht is Co-Founder of Auriss Technologies, Inc, a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair- Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur(TiE), based in Silicon Valley, California.