**OT** The Curry Network aka 'The Indian Mafia'
January 14, 2000
The Curry Network
(Indian nationals found enormous success in Silicon Valley. So they got together and formed a group. Now more Indians meet, greet and get rich.)
By Alex Salkever
For a good Indian curry, call the Marriott in Santa Clara, Calif. As odd as it may sound, the hotel's chefs have mastered delicacies like palakh paneer, dosas and roti out of pleasant necessity. Every other month, the Indus Entrepreneurs (aka TiE) holds its meeting at the hotel. A networking and entrepreneurship nonprofit loosely grouped around connections to India and South Asia, TiE turns these events into serious eating affairs. Members tackle the buffet with a vengeance. "It's really good food. We have trained the kitchen well," beams Bakul Joshi, executive director of TiE.
The buffet is only an appetizer, however. The main course is deals, deals, deals. A laundry list of explosive Web companies - Exodus Communications (EXDS) , HotMail and Junglee, to name a few - have hatched from alliances or struck angel funding deals at TiE meetings. The organization has emerged as a premier deal generator in Silicon Valley. "Pretty much the first week I was in the business, I learned about TiE," says Robert Coneybeer, a partner at venture capital powerhouse New Enterprise Associates. "Almost every one of the companies in our portfolio has some sort of TiE connection. And about half of the CEOs are active in TiE."
tie.org
For a small organization with only 1,200 members worldwide, TiE packs an oversize punch. Since its inception in 1994, the group's annual conference has drawn big-name sponsors like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs, and has featured speakers like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Tim Koogle and Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley.
TiE represents only a fraction of what some Silicon Valley executives call the Indian Mafia, a gang that voraciously seeks IPO opportunities. A veritable international hydra, the group's tentacles reach from California to Boston to Bombay to London, always in search of new ideas and serendipitous connections.
The organization has its own mouthpieces: a 60,000-circulation magazine and the Siliconindia.com Web site, which is part news site, part town crier. The Indus community - Indians who work for U.S. tech companies - is growing, spawning TiE-like organizations and filling some top tech jobs. The new Indian CEOs is a Washington area networking group that's de rigueur for the Silicon Beltway set. In Silicon Valley, ground zero for the Indian tech crowd, four of the five original founders of the Round Zero networking group - which later birthed Epinions.com ? are from India. And the list goes on, from partners at Kleiner Perkins to professors at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Indians are a significant force on the Internet scene.
But TiE diverges from the nachos-and-wine-fueled networking meat markets of Silicon Valley and San Francisco in crucial ways. Rather than back-slapping meetings of wannabe moguls, TiE lets the novices mingle with the chiefs. "I thought it was incredible. You read about these people like Kanwal [Rekhi, founder of ExceLan, the first venture-funded startup headed by an Indian] and Desh [Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks], but you're actually meeting them in person and getting them to talk about what were then very preliminary ideas," says Srini Anumolu, who cofounded Elance.com in January 1998 with indispensible help from TiE.
Indians trained in high-tech have been coming to the U.S. to work for decades, following the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology schools by Prime Minister Jahawaral Nehru after World War II. Most arrive nearly broke. "The standard story of landing here with $108 in your pocket ? the most the government would let you exchange ? is not uncommon," says explains Raj Mashruwala, a charter member of TiE and VP of Tibco Software. "That was my story, too."
Many Indians entered the geek ranks of companies like Xerox (XRX) , IBM (IBM) and Motorola (MOT) . But upper management seldom promoted them to senior roles. "Earlier, Indians were always thought of as good workers. They were not considered [people] who could be managers or could be true entrepreneurs," says K.B. Chandrasekhar, Exodus' cofounder and CEO.
The breakthrough came in the person of Vinod Khosla, a Stanford MBA and Indian Institute of Technology graduate who in 1982 cofounded Sun (SUNW) Microsystems; Sun notched the first wildly successful high-tech startup with an Indian founder. Khosla later went on to snag a partnership at Kleiner Perkins and became a charter member of TiE. Next came Rekhi, the current TiE president and another IIT graduate. Rekhi later sold ExceLan for $200 million to Novell (NOVL) and entered the first wave of the Silicon Valley super-rich back in the pre-dot-com days.
And all of a sudden, Indians were a driving force in the formation of Silicon Valley companies. But they weren't reaching out to fellow Indians. "We were not known for helping each other back then," admits Chandrasekhar.
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