David Jackson (name changed to protect the guilty) was the reason I became an entreprenur in 1982. David worked me for a couple of years at Singer Link…
Ishan Nadkarni is a young entrepreneur from Bombay. He is also a fellow IITB graduate. Ishan stopped by other day at our office in San Mateo. He surprised…
With WeWork, UBER and Lyft fiascos, people are starting to wonder what is going on. Here is my assessment… In the beginning, there were founders, angels and VCs.…
Nadir Godrej comes to SCID (Stanford Center for International Development) India conference every year. As a matter of fact he co-sponsors the conference along with me and Naushad…
Although, picking TCP/IP proved to be the right decision ultimately, it was any thing but easy decision at the time. TCP/IP was seen as tainted protocol, developed by DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) for long haul, slow and unreliable networks using phone lines and was seen as unsuitable…
Excelan was by and large a technology supplier to OEMs. These OEMs were tbuilding super-microcomputers using a plethora of Micro-processors and busses. Most of them ran a version UNIX, many of them were packaged as engineering workstation with CAD applications bundled in. By the time I became CEO…
As I took over as the Interim CEO in March of 1985, we were hemorrhaging cash badly. We were selling Ethernet boards at a list price of about $2000, though average selling price after discounts was about $800.. Cost of the manufacturing boards at volume was about $350.…
In March of 1985 I had the battlefield promotion to become CEO, actually interim CEO, of Excelan. My co-founder Inder Mohan Singh had just quit. Till then I was the VP of engineering and a true hard core Silicon Valley techie. Excelan was founded in April of 1982…
Entrepreneurs are the main source of jobs and new wealth in the modern society. In US almost all the new jobs are created by companies that have been formed since 1975. As a matter of fact, the companies that dominated the Fortune 100 list then have all shed employees and have…
Ray Noorda was the CEO of Novell. He had bought into failing Novell Data System and had turned it around. He ditched all the proprietary hardware and software and focused on Network Operating System software and file server software on standard PC hardware. He shipped complete…