The inaugural siliconindia Tech Factory West, an event designed to initiate debate on key technology issues and to bring together aspiring entrepreneurs, kicked off at the Palo Alto Hills Golf and Country Club on March 23 with a vigorous discussion on “Booming B2B.” A sellout crowd of over 300 came to wrap their minds around the new biggest thing and to quiz the leading lights in the business, many questioning even the very assumptions fundamental to current B2B models. Yogesh Sharma, editor, siliconindia, introduced Sand Hill Group founder and angel investor M.R. Rangaswami, who moderated the discussion. The panelists were Asim Abdullah, vice president of Commerce One; Rajiv Gupta, general manager of Hewlett-Packard; Rakesh Sood, general partner of the Sprout Group; S. Srinivasan, vice president for Internet Solutions at Tibco Software; Murrali Rangarajan, CEO of Logistix; and Paras Gupta, CEO of @manage. In addition to participating in the discussion at hand, the panelists answered a number of questions and even managed to squeeze in some one-on-one chats with members of the audience before the event wound down, well past 10 p.m.
The second event in the Tech Factory East series, which took place in New York City on April 5, drew a capacity crowd that gathered to hear Sam Pitroda, chairman and CEO of WorldTel; Hiten Patel, CEO of GCI and Raj Vaswani, an attorney with Morrison & Foerster, LLP, discuss their “Entrepreneurial War Stories,” which made it a truly inspirational and educational evening. Vaswani, with his experience in helping startups boost growth, began by introducing some fundamental concepts and trends in equity financing, explaining how the concepts can be leveraged to grow a startup. Hiten Patel shared the story of growing GCI from 15 employees to becoming an Inc.500 company. The audience interacted with him throughout, quizzing him on the lessons the company learned at every step of the way. Finally, Sam Pitroda took the stage, spell-binding the audience with his brand of war stories, which span from starting Wescom in the 1970s, to selling it off to Rockwell International, learning the big-company management ropes at Rockwell, to setting camp in India, and bringing the telecom revolution to every nook and cranny of the country, dealing with range a personalities on the Indian scene: politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, young engineers and a staff of 3 million. Pitroda’s Q&A session continued well past the scheduled buffet dinner at 8 p.m., with audience members seeking guidance to addressing the India market, clues into his views on liberalization, advice on joint ventures, and other hot topics. Dinner at Utsav restaurant was a five-course treat as usual.

The unexpected cold and wet turn of weather did not affect the turnout at Atlanta 2000 on April 8. A top lineup of more than 40 speakers gave the audience a solid perspective on the developments in the technology world in areas including wireless, B2B, Internet and communications, inspiring with entrepreneurial success stories of determination and savvy. Raj Deshpande, chairman of Camber Corp. and Techforia Partners kicked off the event, delivering a keynote address titled “Growth vs. Revenues vs. Equity” in which, relying on his vast experience in building great companies, he discussed the relationship between fast growth, the Old, the New, and the “New New” Economy rules, balanced revenue growth and how to leverage equity to accomplish some of the company’s goals.

The first panel discussion, “Opportunity or Mirage,” was moderated by Rajen Sheth, managing director of In-core, and featured as panel members Jay Choudhary, CEO and president of Coreharbor; Sree Rajan, co-founder and strategic advisor of the much-talked about Yodlee.com; Jatin Bains, CEO of Pricecontainer.com and Murali Anantharaman, managing partner at LiveOak Equity Partners. Choudhary described how, despite his background in data warehousing, he leveraged his sales and marketing experience, and relied on his partners’ experience in security to create secureIT, which he sold last year to Verisign. The key, said Choudhary, is to build your venture around what you already have, taking advantage of your business domain knowledge.

The panel “Wealth on the Wireless Web” focused on requirements for success in the wireless world and identifying the opportunities that exist for budding entrepreneurs in this fast-growing area. Panel moderator Venkatesh Shukla, CEO of everypath.com, started out by recounting that Wall Street investors were plaguing his company because of the hype of the wireless space. Patrick Taylor of air2web.com believes that the projected number of wireless users will grow to an astounding 1 billion users by the year 2005, which would make the current Internet growth pale in comparison. Manoj Goel, product line manager at Cisco Systems, elucidated for the audience the difference among the various wireless systems: residential wireless, mobile wireless, enterprise wireless, fixed wireless and satellite wireless. In response to a question about hype and reality in the wireless world, Dayakar Puskoor, CEO of JP Systems, said that standards are still missing in the wireless world. Puskoor lamented the fact that technologies like GSM are not developed in the US, whereas they play a major role in Europe.

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