For Anil Aggarwal, having a British professor in Honolulu is the stuff that nightmares are made of. Yet having passed up the less-than-salubrious climate of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon for the enticing temperatures and delectable pineapples of the University of Hawaii, he was confronted with exactly that scenario. His British professor insisted on having classes on the beach, and while the professor enjoyed the warm sun and waded into the slapping of waves, his students — Anil included — had to write their theses on the dry shore. That said, there could be worse places to study. After collecting his degree in Hawaii and growing the wireless custom-chip business for VLSI from $24 million to $65 million, Aggarwal completed an MBA (although he contends, “There’s more to be learned in the bars than in the classroom”) and now hopes to corner personal area networks, a market pegged at $5 billion in 2005. But the casual jocularity of Aggarwal conceals ferocious ambition; he is indeed a wolf in lamb’s clothing. Aided by investments from NeoMagic’s Prakash Aggarwal and Mark Stevens at Sequoia Capital, he’s confronting the Motorolas and Texas Instruments of the world (including other formidable startups like Silicon Wave, funded by Sevin Rosen Funds). How much capital does it take to go after the big guys? He’s not talking, and will say only: “I would rather you wait for an upcoming announcement regarding that.” As the CEO of Telencomm — a name that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue — Aggarwal is in the business of making systems on a chip for wireless applications. While trying to enable all kinds of devices to inter-communicate, Aggarwal aims to produce chips that are more cost-effective and easier to manufacture than anybody else. Aggarwal’s chips would sit inside a modem to facilitate wireless connectivity. The chips would also enable a computer without a GSM, TDMA or CDMA card to connect to a cell phone, which in turn can push out the requisite message. So what are Anil Aggarwal’s future plans, apart from launching a full-fledged product by early next year? “When most people ask me that question, they expect to hear an answer along the lines of seeing my picture on the cover of Business Week or something,” he says. “But all I really want is something much more simple: to buy a product with my chip in it.” While Aggarwal is taking on the big hardware boys in personal area networking, the software development arena in wide-area networking is a battleground for the puny. A seething group of startups are clamoring for customer attention, and a disproportionate number are headed by Indians. A Swiss Chronometer Consider Palo Alto-based Phonespan, which aims to provide “engines for the mobile Internet” on a global scale and has already opened offices in Tokyo and London. CEO Dev Khare has impeccable credentials: degrees from Wharton and Harvard Business School, in conjunction with stints as an investment banker and a project manager at CrossWorlds Software. His icy-smooth speech is like the ticking of an expensive Swiss chronometer, smooth and undyingly regular. In February 1999, Khare got together with Krishna Vedarti and Srinivas Mandyam, both ex-IITans who have worked for DARPA, LSI Logic, and other tech names to determine the “next curve” — and to get there before anyone else. The list they came up with covered four areas: genomics, optical networks, broadband and wireless. With an opportunistic grimace, they decided to follow the high road to wireless. Phonespan, which is currently experimenting with a couple of customers, has snagged $12 million in funding from, among others, Norwest, Goldman Sachs, AOL, Nokia, BEA Systems and Mobile Portals. The cash will mainly be spent on product development and serve to bolster it’s the company’s presence in places like Europe and Asia. Most of the investors are prospective customers. “When TV came along, people just replicated radio shows on them,” says Khare. For example, diehard Citizen Kane fans will recall how the 23-year old director Orson Welles translates a radio’s sounds to on-screen distances. Khare hates Welles: “That’s exactly what’s happening in the wireless world,” he laments. “People are just replicating wireline services on them. What we intend to do is provide localized, personalized service designed for wireless devices.” And then, the inevitable question: Do you have any clients? “Yes, but we haven’t made their names official as yet.” Air2Web Takes Off While Khare is working on his first startup, Sanjoy Malik is now on his second. After driving Synchrologic, which sells syncing software to corporations, to the stage where an IPO is imminent later this year, Malik left to found Air2Web in late 1999. Air2Web has quickly become one of the hottest companies in Atlanta, boasting a board that reads like the who’s-who of the area. The company has effortlessly raised more than $35 million in a first round with iGate Capital, which indirectly provides access to several hundred prospective clients. Its main competitors are Aether Systems and 724 Solutions, both of which boast $6 billion-plus market capitalization — but slim revenues. Malik characterizes the wireless arena as “a detailed plumbing problem.” With the explosion of the number and type of devices of devices (geo-positioning devices can now be placed on a horse’s head on a race-track to monitor progress), and the tangled net of wireless protocols, a single firm doesn’t carry the bandwidth to handle the relentlessly changing landscape. Air2Web has built a powerful hosted platform that other players can plug into for delivering wireless content. For example, a couple of software companies that provide Web-related software for banks, like financial aggregator VerticalOne (a subsidiary of S1 Corp) and Digital Insight (which targets small- and medium-size community banks with banking infrastructure software) use Air2Web to provide a wireless banking solution. Malik contends that despite being on the cutting-edge of technology, “we are built and structured as a business,” in the classic sense of the word. He feels that Air2Web is built to capitalize on solid revenues —not ephemeral Web-multiples that kick in at IPO time, afterward vanishing forever. What he is doing differently, though, is learning to grow rapidly on all fronts, in a simultaneous outburst of energy. “We hired our sales guys on day one,” notes Malik. Plus, reacting to the absurdly high amounts of money given to some potential competitors like Brience, Malik delicately adds: “Having a lot of money is not a panacea.” Elephant on a Rampage “Absurdly high,” by Brience’s standards, is a $200 million commitment in their first round, the largest ever first-round funding for a startup — even in the extravagant history of Silicon Valley. Whereas Khare is on his first, Malik on his second, Brience’s Keyur Patel is on his third startup. He officially left KPMG at the end of February of this year, and launched Brience the next day. In the first two minutes of conversation with Patel, any visions of a soft-bellied consultant kowtowing to the often flawed visions of his client are dispelled forever. Patel, despite a stint at chief e-strategist and managing partner at KPMG, the grandfather of consulting firms, comes across as a thirsty elephant on a wild rampage. Like an eight-grade student forcefully bundled into kindergarten, he conveys the distinct impression of wanting to get all the boring homework done and move on to more interesting stuff. His vision is to compress the creation of a company into one blinding flash of light. “It used to take four to five years to be a real company. The Internet reduced that to two years. You have no time to waste.” So, on the $200 million question: What’s the money being used for? Patel’s company plans to make its money by providing Global 1000 companies that have IT budgets of at least $25 million with a broadband wireless platform for a multitude of devices. Hence the name “Brience,” derived from a conflation of “broadband” and “experience.” Like Metrius, Patel’s previous venture which was folded into KPMG and grew to revenues of $300 million in two years, the new firm will make its cash from a mixture of software and services. Using their services, firms like Schwab will be able to allow its customers trading over their PDAs, and Cisco sales engineers will be able to download data to their Palms at a client’s site without the parent companies having to duplicate any existing infrastructure. Apart from building out its software and ramping up the seventy-odd people already at the firm, Brience has already moved into acquisition mode, and has made a couple of strategic investments. Plus, where other firms are battling for space in San Francisco and braving questions about their business model from grumpy potential landlords, Patel has purchased a four-story building in San Francisco’s South Market area to accommodate Brience’s projected growth. And to address that terrible question again: Do you have any clients? The answer comes back: Sort of. “We’re in beta-testing with a couple but plan to roll out mid-summer.” Whether it be with Aggarwal’s systems-on-a-chip, or software from folks on their first, second or third startup, the wireless landscape is being split asunder. History is generally inconsiderate. The Russian kulaks were not around to stand justice on Stalin’s purges; Logie Baird, the inventor of the television, is not around to see edifying talk shows. But, in a historically ambient way, the wireless space is being partly instituted by a race that loves talk – except perhaps, about details regarding their startups. Krishnan Sethumadhavan works in strategic planning for a startup in Connecticut.

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