IndiaPost.com - TiEcon presents new face of entrepreneurship

India Post News Service

SANTA CLARA: TiEcon 2007 was held in the Santa Clara Convention Center on May 18 and 19. With its theme of "The New Face of Entrepreneurship", and attendance of around 4000 people, TiEcon inspired attendees to 'Dream, Explore, Connect'. With keynote speakers like Tim O'Reilly Founder & CEO O'Reilly Media, Ashwin Navin President & Co-founder BitTorrent Inc., Alex Welch Co-Founder & CEO Photobucket, Nobuyuki Idei Chief Corp.

Advisor Sony Corp., Marc Benioff Chairman & CEO Salesforce.com, Jake Grieves-Cook Chairman Kenya Tourism Board, AJ Patel Chairman Hasla - Mara Wildlife Conservation Foundation, Meg Whitman President & CEO eBay Inc., Robert Ingram Vice Chairman GlaxoSmithKline and Sadhguru Founder Isha Foundation, TiEcon had motivation and experience coming out of its well attended seams.

If that was not enough, there was a series of distinguished speakers including Vinod Khosla Founder Khosla Ventures, Al Hammond VP World Resource Institute, Tero Ojanperä EVP & CTO Nokia, Takeshi Natsuno SVP & MD NTT DoCoMo, Curtis Carlson President & CEO SRI International, Ravi Venkatesan Chairman Microsoft India, Ajit Singh President & CEO Siemens Medical, Gerard Mooney VP IBM Corp., Zia Yusuf EVP SAP AG and Matt Cohler VP Facebook.

And that was just the speakers- with that kind of sheer talent, brainpower and expertise under one roof it would be a criminal waste if all present did not come away with an idea or two. Of course, if you came in with an idea the place to be was the Entrepreneurs Bazaar where you could pitch it to VCs. Simply drifting around and networking could work almost as well. As Raj Jaswa, President TiE Silicon Valley, said in his opening speech

"The magic of TiEcon is networking". Raj, in his second term as president, said that what is truly unique about TiE is that it runs on volunteer power (eight staff members and 400 volunteers worked months on all facets of producing TiEcon). TiE is an example of how volunteer spirit can produce high visibility, professionally produced events which also showcase the Indo-American community. TiE which got its start as

'The Indus Entrepreneurs' has come to represent Talents, Ideas, Enterprise in its revised avatar. The Indus American slant covers people from the countries India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Ajit Nazre, VC at Kleiner Perkins said that of the last 100 companies funded by KP, 57 had Indus co-founders and 23 CEOs were from the Indus region. Raj's involvement with TiE started in 1994 when he was the founder and President of OPTi, Inc. He has been a serial entrepreneur and is a firm believer in startups and small companies.

He said that "getting laid off may be the best thing to happen. When you have nothing to lose, you can start with a clean slate and your thinking gets freer". Every time he was laid off, Raj went on to start a company. The building blocks for starting a company are available with the help of organizations like TiE. You can start a company with much less money and effort. In the Valley, everyone (legal, sales and others) will work for equity.

With the details taken care of, the entrepreneur can focus on making the best product/ widget out there. For "good products will not succeed, better products will not succeed, the best products will be the only ones that succeed". The entrepreneur needs a complementary team and the best mentors that there are. TiE helps with all that, it has all the knowledge, best practices, etc. that can be assembled with its members' combined expertise.

"It is the Harvard or MIT for entrepreneurship". All the abovementioned can only gel or succeed around people- their efforts and the product should be successful. However, it definitely does not hurt to get input from "the most powerful congregation of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley." (Doug Leone, General Partner, Sequoia Capital). The true entrepreneurial spirit of the conference was brilliantly epitomized by Anshul Samar, 13 year old CEO of Elementeo which is a chemistry trading card board game. Anshul was at TiEcon to raise seed money ($100,000) to fund his company production of the games he wants to sell to all Californian schools, with an eventual target of all US schools and becoming a top game on Amazon.

He wants to "inject fun into education". According to his father, Vipin Samar, VP at Oracle, Anshul says "the company is by the kids, for the kids, adults stay out". Another enterprising youngster at TiEcon was Monte Malhotra, Stanford undergrad, who has authored "The Young Investor's Guide to Retiring Young", currently listed on Amazon. With the median age of exhibitors rapidly going down with inclusions like these two, and life sciences, Web 2.0 and social network sites showcased as the new frontier, we can look forward to more ideas being introduced in future TiEcons. Other exhibitors included Sun, Deloitte, etc. who were marketing their startup related products, Google reaching out to potential employees and various law firms specializing in corporate law. The region of Ontario, Canada finds TiEcon to be a good venue to reach the talent pool in the Silicon Valley and has attended many TiEcons.

Pankaj Mhatre, startup founder, said that all the VC panels had been of great help to him, personally, as an entrepreneur. That is what the essence of TiEcon is all about, what makes people come back year after year- to Dream big dreams, Explore new frontiers and Connect with people.