ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

TiE's Annual Event Is Sold Out

Kamla Bhatt in San Jose

This Cinco de Mayo weekend (May 6-7), The Indus Entrepreneurs will host its 7th annual conference titled, 'Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century', at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

The featured speakers include Dr Jim Clark, Dr Gururaj Deshpande, Dr Amar Bhide and Bapsi Sidhwa, the South Asian novelist.

It is fitting that Clark, who acted as a catalyst in unleashing the Internet revolution and recognizes the technical prowess of the Indian engineers in the Silicon Valley, will deliver the keynote speech.

"The Indian engineers had the lust for the kill that Clark (Jim) liked. They were ferociously, recklessly competitive," notes Michael Lewis in his book The New New Thing. Clark is a co-founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc, Netscape Communications, Healtheon/WebMD (co-founder Pavan Nigam) myCFO and Shutterfly.com.

Dr Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande, co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks, Inc, will deliver the thematic keynote speech. Sycamore had one of the best IPO debuts on Wall Street last year and was named as one of the Top 10 Picks for 2000 by Fortune .

Harvard Business School Professor Bhide will provide the closing speech address on Sunday, May 7. Bhide is the author of a recently published book The Origin and Evolution of New Business, and you are probably going to hear a very different viewpoint on entrepreneurship. In this book Bhide argues that entrepreneurs are not risk-takers and innovators and neither do they depend on venture capital. Many of the businesses start small and stay that way according to him. Many of the success stories happen in areas with a high degree of uncertainty and the hi-tech sector is one of them. Bhide was formerly a consultant at McKinsey & Company.

Houston-based Sidhwa will be the featured speaker for the banquet dinner on May 6. She explains that when she accepted the invitation, "I did not realize that I would be talking to a group of unimaginably successful technocrats. Had the realization sunk in, I might have felt intimidated and backed off. Of course, like all desis, I have heard about the almost legendary prowess of our high-tech whiz kids from South Asia and I am very proud of their innovation and of the inroads they have made into this very new and competitive sphere. I am intrigued by them, and looking forward to learning about a discipline I know very little about."

Sidhwa points out that she will not be talking to the entrepreneurs about anything that will be of practical use for them. Instead she will talk about the achievements of the South Asian literary community in this country. She will also read from one of her earlier novels The Crow Eaters. She describes that the book is "about the journey of an adventurous Parsi entrepreneur from Gujarat to North India, and his rather dubious methods of setting up a business and creating wealth in the Punjab."

Besides these speakers, the two-day event will have a "superb slate of panel speakers of different tracks, " notes Bakul Joshi, of TiE. Some of the panel discussions include, 'Growing at Internet Speed', 'From PowerPoint to funding and other resources', 'It's People, People', and 'Women Entrepreneurs'.

There will be about 1500 people attending the two-day event and as Joshi says, "The reponse to TiECon events have always been strong but this year it is much more so."

Two new features have been added to the conference this year. The first one is that the event will be webcast for others who cannot attend the event. The second feature is a company showcase that will feature about 50 odd companies that are pre-IPO.

Ever since it was founded in the early 1990s, TiE has steadily grown and today has chapters in Boston, Austin, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Canada and five chapters in India.

Previous: Digital dilemma

Tell us what you think of this report