Monday, January 12, 2009


Raju Vegesna is an evangelist for Zoho and is one of the foremost thought leaders in the Office 2.0 revolution. Raju is one of the key people responsible for developing the strategic direction of the Zoho Suite. Prior to joining AdventNet, Raju co-founded an Internet services company serving the educational market. He holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.

Zoho is a remarkable company. They have out maneuvered all the usual suspects such as Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce at their own games. The entire operation has been boot-strapped and today, the company generates revenues of $40 million a year from all its divisions and makes a profit of $1 million a month. The company also does not hire MBAs or Ivy League school grads because business today moves so fast that they seek people with real world experience versus those who have learned it from a text book. Zoho was the winner of
Best Web 2.0 Apps at our Web 2.0 Conference in January.

Monday, September 22, 2008


SpaceX is the third company founded by Mr. Musk. Prior to SpaceX, he co-founded PayPal, the world's leading electronic payment system, and served as the company's chairman and CEO. PayPal has over twenty million customers in 38 countries, processes several billion dollars per year and went public on the NASDAQ under PYPL in early 2002. Mr. Musk was the largest shareholder of PayPal until the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002.

Before PayPal, Mr. Musk co-founded Zip2 Corporation in 1995, a leading provider of enterprise software and services to the media industry, with investments from The New York Times Company, Knight-Ridder, MDV, Softbank and the Hearst Corporation. He served as Chairman, CEO and Chief Technology Officer and in March 1999 sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in an all cash transaction.

Mr. Musk's early experience extends across a spectrum of advanced technology industries, from high energy density ultra-capacitors at Pinnacle Research to software development at Rocket Science and Microsoft. He has a physics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a business degree from Wharton and originally came out to California to pursue graduate studies in high energy density capacitor physics & materials science at Stanford.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008


Vinod Dham. Acclaimed worldwide as the “Father of the Pentium Processor”, is a Co-Founder and Managing Director of NewPath Ventures LLC, a cross border Indo-US venture fund. Dham was the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Silicon Spice Inc. a start up involved in developing innovative “Voice over Internet” technologies for the emerging VOIP market. Silicon Spice was acquired by Broadcom Corporation. Vin spent early years of his career at Intel Corporation where he rose to be the Vice President and General Manager of the Microprocessor Products group, managing the Pentium, 486 and 386 Microprocessors businesses, generating multi-billion dollar revenues. He was responsible for developing Non-Volatile memory technologies at Intel and NCR. He worked on several generations of products and was a co-inventor of Intel’s Flash memory technology. At Advance Micro Devices, Dham laid the foundation of Microprocessor development methodologies, product roadmap and oversaw the launch of K6 - then the world’s fastest windows processor.

Umang Gupta in the 70’s became one of IBM’s first Indian employees where he handled some of IBM’s largest corporate accounts. As employee #17 at Oracle, he wrote the company’s first formal business plan. He went on to found Gupta Technologies, a provider of the world’s first client/server database software that would run on PC’s rather than mini-computers. It hit a valuation of $400 million. Today, he runs Keynote Systems in San Mateo, which measures Web site performance for e-commerce companies. Keynote is the J.D. Powers of the internet world, monitoring and measuring how well websites are serving their customers. With a mission to improve the quality of e-commerce worldwide, its 2500 customers include Dell, Microsoft, Charles Schwab, E-trade and Amazon.com.

Raj Jaswa is the President of TiE Silicon Valley, the largest nonprofit dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship. Raj served as co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Selectica (Nasdaq: SLTC), an enterprise software company. During Raj’s tenure, Selectica was named to the Forbes 500, Deloitte & Touche Technology Fast 500, Software 500, Inc 500, and Interactive Week 500. Selectica reached a peak market value of $5 billion in 2000. Jaswa and his partners were rejected by six VCs, mortgaged their homes and “borrowed from our mothers and brothers-in-law” to get the $600,000 they needed to bootstrap Selectica. From 1988 to 1996, Raj served as co-founder, President, and Director of Opti (Nasdaq: OPTI), and previously as EVP of Sales and Marketing. Opti was the world’s largest supplier of PC chipsets. Opti reached a peak market value of $350 million in 1995.

Arun Sarin joined Pacific Telesis Group in San Francisco in 1984 and has served in many executive positions in his 20 year career in telecommunications. He was a director of AirTouch from July 1995 and was President and Chief Operating Officer from February 1997 to June 1999. He was Chief Executive Officer for the Vodafone United States and Asia Pacific region until 15 April 2000, when he became a non-executive director. He has served as a director of The Gap, Inc., The Charles Schwab Corporation and Cisco Systems, Inc. and in June 2005 was appointed as a non-executive director to the Court of the Bank of England.

Vinod Khosla was formerly a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins and founder of Sun Microsystems. Vinod has been labeled the #1 VC by Forbes and Fortune recently labeled him as one the nation’s most influential ethanol advocates, noting “there are venture capitalists, and there’s Vinod Khosla.” Vinod Khosla, one of green tech’s most prominent investor has funded entrepreneurs building solar power plants that will dwarf football fields and companies that will make ethanol from wood chips. “I’m the only one in the world forecasting oil dropping in price to $35 a barrel by 2030. I’ll put it on the record: Oil will not be able to compete with cellulosic biofuels. If you do it from food, the food will get so expensive you can’t make fuel out of it. “ I think the most powerful social force we have when it comes to solving our problems and multiplying our resources is the entrepreneurs and technologists and scientists. And the culture of Silicon Valley. It is the solution and may be the only solution. Policy can help. But policy doesn’t work without technology innovation”.

Kaval Kaur with her husband Jasvir co-founded Virsa Systems where she directed its back-office operations from its beginnings in 1996 till its acquisition by SAP in 2006. Virsa’s compliance software helps companies monitor and enforce business controls in real-time across their enterprise and legacy systems. The aim is to ensure continuous compliance with regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley rules governing U.S. public companies and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) federal standards for U.S. health-care information.