In the startup world there is a common saying, "You can either mine for gold or you can sell tools that miners need to mine for gold." The irony is that the miners are not the ones who became rich, but tycoons like Levi Strauss and Samuel Brannan who sold jeans, shovels and pickaxes during the California Gold rush of 1848. Today there are only very few like Levi Strauss and Samuel Brannan to identify the right opportunity at right time and make the right decision to make it big.

This issue, we have tried to identify few such great minds – Umang Gupta, Chairman & CEO, Keynote Systems, Steve Sanghi, CEO of Microchip and Agilis International founder Jaswinder Matharu. What makes all these great people unique is all of them have tried their best to identify right opportunity at right time and aspire to be big.

On the cover, we present you the story of how Umang Gupta has transformed an internet health monitoring entity to a $124 million Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring giant after braving the internet bubble burst, while others may have retreated. His conscious decision to focus on providing clients with the desired outcome and grow organically through strategies acquisitions has made the company into a big success today.

We have the compelling story of how Steve Sanghi, CEO of Microchip took the company to the most successful IPO of 1993 and why Sanghi believed that the struggling startup Microchip required an approach that would improve all aspects of the enterprise, while involving each employee in the journey . There is also another story of similar entrepreneur- Jaswinder Matharu who firmly believed in his instincts and continued to build four companies and kept striving for success and value creation. For all these entrepreneurs, they looked around for a pain point that needs a true solution at the right time.

This issue is a compendium of such entrepreneurs for our readers to learn from them to know more about how to hit the bull's eye at the right time, which is very critical. A person to hit at the right time will make it big.

Please do let us know what you think.

Christo Jacob
Managing Editor
editor@siliconindia.com