I am writing this as I
am stranded for more than 15 hours in the Airport on my way back to Bangalore
from San Francisco. My co-passengers cribbing about the terrible delay. I told
myself, this incident should never spoil my joyous mood of having an eventful
trip to the Bay Area. I thought it would be great time to blog on my
experience.
I’d
like to start by thanking TiE Bangalore (Kunal and Sehera) and Venkat of TiE Silicon Valley for choosing Discover Dollar as
delegate and sponsoring my travel to US and offering me opportunity to be
part of TiECon 2015,
one of the most high profile startup event attended by more than four thousand
entrepreneurs and covered extensively in Forbes and other
highly profile publishers.
The
highlight of first day at TiECon was lunch meeting with Walmart CIO Suja Chandra. I was amazed by her depth of knowledge, vision
and impressed by her growth story.
I also met dynamic and very charismatic entrepreneur Phil Libin,
Founder and CEO of Evernote App. Evernote is now valued
at $1 Billion and planning go for an IPO. Most of the information I am writing
in this blog was from notes I captured in Evernote app during the sessions. He
spoke about Evernote's growth story and changing phase of Data Economy. I had a
chance to have pic with him. 
One
of the major Keynote speaker at TiECon was Jack Welch. Welch is one of the
prolific leaders who served as CEO and Chairman of General Electric from 1981
to 2001. During his tenure, GE's value rose 4000%. He was named as
"Manager of the Century" by Fortune Magazine in 1999. Two gem of
statements from Jack Welch at TiEcon :
·
I went to India to find low cost but instead found high brains.
It was my discovery after Vasco-Da-Gama
- Fifty of Fortune 500 Company CEOs worked for me in the past. As true leader, my real achievement is grooming them
Got
a personally signed copy of book The Real-Life MBA from
Jack & Suzy Welch
I was very impressed with Vivek Randive's story of starting a
company on Information Bus and having all Wallstreet companies as customers.
His success with TIBCO and Basketball coaching and how he ended up buying
Sacramento Kings.
I
was truly humbled when I attended TiE Youth Session. 13 year wonder-kids were
giving gyan on entrepreneurship and sharing their success storeis.
Shubham
Banarjee has built a Braille Printer which costs below $350 using Lego (75%
lesser than current printers). Intel has funded his project and his team
comprises of people from Whitehouse and Harvard University.
Tanay Tandon is
founder at Clipped, a seed-funded natural language startup focused on using
machine learning to summarize news articles into bullet-point summaries for
faster reading. To-date, Clipped has amassed 280k users with 45 million
summarized articles, topping iTunes news charts upon launch. Tanay enjoys
working at the confluence of research problems and consumer facing products,
with his research in computer vision and ML having been featured on BBC,
Forbes, and TNW
Sushil
Sudhakar is a thirteen-year old eighth-grader at Keystone Montessori in
Phoenix, Arizona. He recently launched his most recent endeavor, Fill-Yo-Dosa,
at the Arizona Children’s Business Fair which turned cash flow positive within
four hours of launch.
Muthu
Alagappan is a medical student known for his professional basketball analytics.
After speaking at the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, several
professional teams began to use the company's software. He was given the top
prize at the conference, and GQ called his work both "a new frontier for
the NBA" and "Muthuball"—an allusion to Moneyball baseball
statistical analysis known for revolutionizing the sport. Forbes included him
in "30 Under 30" list of influential people in the sports
industry.
I
am also excited by Vivek Wadhwa's talk on how technology is going to bring
humongous change in our lives. Talks by Preet Bharara and Vishal Sikka was
inspiring.
TiECon
ended on high note and loads of enthusiasm.
I
stayed for 15 more days in the States after TiECon and I want to thank my
College friend Roopesh Rao for
providing me roof at SandHill Road which
was world's most expensive place to live in late 1990s. (Even now it's terribly
expensive!)
I
attended Retail EXPO at PlugNPlay Tech Center, one of the most popular place
for Startups in Silicon Valley. I had chance to interact with 20+ amazing
startups solving problems in Retail space. I did visit Stanford and visited
their Graduate School of Business. I had chance to interact with current
students and explore if I can attract them to intern with us. (We did have
interns previously from Wharton Business School, U-Penn and IIM
Bangalore).
Later
I traveled to Seattle, Washington and met a potential customer who was
impressed with our solution. [Cannot share more details on public forum ;)]
I
enjoyed my meeting and conversation with my mentor SD Shibulal (Founder
& ex-CEO of Infosys) who shared his rich experience on building companies
and early days of their journey with Infosys.
Apart
from this I had met a large number of people and companies including CEOs, VCs,
Partner companies, discussed potential JVs etc.
On
overall, this trip has been so far the most eventful and memorable one among
all of my visits to the States. It has opened new paradigms of opportunities,
elevated my vision and inspired higher hopes and sense of greater target and
achievements.
