Achievers
Books
Business
Calendar
Community
Controversy
Cuisine
Eateries
Education
Enterprise
Faith
Good Samaritans
Health
Infotech
Media
Memories
Movies
News Archives
Opinion
Specials
The Arts

From Meerut to Silicon Valley: The $ 11-billion story

Kamla Bhatt

The total value of the US-India trade last year was estimated to be $ 11 billion. Now, consider this -- three companies started by an Indian in the US were sold for over $ 11 billion last year in three separate deals.

Meet Raj Singh, who makes national trade deficits look like household grocery accounts. He grew up in a village near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, but today travels all over the globe fixing business deals and identifying promising new-economy businesses.

Singh's three companies that were sold for $ 11 billion were - StratumOne, a communication chip company; Cerent, an optical transport company; and Siara Networks.

StratumOne was acquired by Cisco for about $ 435 million. This acquisition set a record for chip companies because previously companies in this category were acquired in the $ 100-200 million range.

After selling StrutumOne, Singh started a new company called Roshnee Corporation, an optical switching company. Roshnee, according to many analysts, is poised to make a significant contribution in the highly competitive optical networking market.

Cerent too was acquired by CISCO for $ 6.2 billion. This was Cisco's largest and most talked about acquisition last year and raised quite a few eyebrows in the networking and communication industry.

Siara Networks was sold to the Sunnyvale-based Redback Networks for $ 4.3 billion.

Singh also takes a keen interest in the companies he invests in. He is one of the co-founders, along with Raj Parekh, of the Los Altos-based Venture Capital firm, Redwood Ventures Partners-III, believed by many analysts to be the only Indian VC firm in the US. Currently, Redwood has more than 40 companies in its portfolio.

Redwood Ventures was started by Singh in 1997 and it was called Redwood Ventures-I. This was followed by Redwood Ventures-II.

Singh's transition from an engineer to an entrepreneur / investor happened in the 1990s. He was able to achieve this phenomenal success in a short span of four years and credits his fellow workers and friends for this.

In 1996 he founded Fiberlane Communications with some seed money from the Menlo Park-based VC firm of Kleiner, Caufield and Byers where Vinod Khosla is a general partner. Khosla was also a member of Fiberlane's board of directors. Eventually, Singh spun off two companies from Fiberlane: Cerent and Siara and the rest is network history.

However, Singh too saw his fair share of struggle.

After graduating from Roorkee Engineering College, he joined the Indian Navy in the late 1960s. He left the navy in 1970 and joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. He didn't stick around at TIFR for long and joined a start-up called Alpha Electro, New Delhi, which manufactured micro-computers. The venture, however, failed.

For the next 10 years Singh travelled to Libya on government assignments with wife and three daughters in tow.

In 1980, he finally took a calculated risk and joined the University of Minnesota where he completed his Master's degree in computer science. Like many other graduate students he then moved to Silicon Valley.

His first job was with National Semiconductor where he joined at the entry-level.

In Silicon Valley too Singh changed jobs frequently and worked for several companies, including Cirrus Logic and Nexgen (that was subsequently acquired by Advanced Micro Devices), for the next 15 years. He was employee "number 16" at Cirrus Logic and counts Suhas Patil, its founder, as one of his mentors.

He was employee "number 9" at Nexgen and counts its CEO, Atiq Reza, as his mentor too.

What Singh learnt from Patil and Reza were persistence, hardwork and the ability to believe in one's dreams.

Singh's day starts at 4 am when he spends time answering e-mails. "When you have a company to run, you tend to think a lot and I found that the best time to get a lot of things sorted out was in the morning," he explains.

After spending a couple of hours at his PC terminal, he goes for a walk. His walk is, however, the time when he meets up with entrepreneurs who want to discuss their business plans with him. He calls it "talk while you walk."

Singh is on the board of 23 firms which means that his day is packed with business meetings - some in Boston, others in Israel, but a majority of them in Silicon Valley.

The only time he skips this routine is when he spends three weeks in India visiting his father in a village near Meerut. For three weeks Singh cuts himself free of all work. But that doesn't mean he is able to get away from it. When he gets back home in California, there are hundreds of emails queued up in his mailbox. It takes him more than a week to go through them.

Singh says India can tap into the Internet boom and provide software applications for the networked economy. "What happened to the PC industry will happen to the networking industry too. The growth in the networking and communications sector has just begun and will continue for the next 10 years," predicts Singh.

Singh is currently working on plans to make an endorsement to his alma mater - Roorkee University. He also plans to establish an educational institution in India that will offer on-line distance education.

Next: Talati's tales of life

Tell us what you think of this report