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There are two mistakes one can make |
Hemant Kanakia: Accidental Entrepreneur
We all know people who have known from their childhood what they want to be when they grow up. I wasn’t one of those kids. While growing up in Mumbai, I spent most of my spare time reading books. Fiction or non-fiction, Gujarati or English. I would visit family functions with a book in my hand and loose myself in one room reading while rest were enjoyed the party. The only dream I had back then was to be a great novelist.
I graduated from IIT-Mumbai with a degree in Engineering. While quite a few of my classmates went to the US for their higher studies, I stayed back to be closer to my family and worked at Tata Consultancy Services. That was the beginning of my love for engineering. Unlike most of my compatriots at TCS, I worked on maintaining hardware – computers and printers. In my spare time, I learnt all I could about the wonderful new computer architecture of the Burroughs machine from manuals. That fascination is what finally made me go to the US for higher studies: a MS from Case Western Reserve and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
After graduation, I joined the research department at Bell Laboratories. The best description of that place is that it is a world of geniuses under very little supervision doing their thing with no strings attached. It may sound like a terrible idea but it was exciting to be in the company of people who have given so may unique things to the world of computing. For instance, Unix, C, and C++ was created by colleagues I worked with. The place taught me so many things, the main ones being humility, determination to change world and defying conventional wisdom. The only ambition I had in that era was to be a great scientist.
After leading a 6-year long, satisfying research career I decided to take my research to the real world. I founded a company for building next-generation routers that were ten times faster, ten times cheaper and ten times smaller than what was commercially available at that time. The basis technology was based on the switching architecture I had worked out while at Bell Laboratories. The company was successful beyond my wildest dreams. After 3 years I sold the company to Ericsson for $450 Million.
This meant a new career path for me. All that I had learnt about being a good engineer was now replaced about what I had learnt about how to be a good entrepreneur. Since 1999, I have been advising several start-ups – some that failed and some that succeeded. I also became a General Partner at Columbia Capital, a venture capital firm based in Washington DC, which funds companies in the US and Israel. Currently, I spend my time between New Delhi and in Washington DC, pursuing my passion of nurturing start-ups and investing in early–stage companies.
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