Dr. R.A. Mashelkar to speak at TiE-Boston’s Legends & Leaders Event September 29, 2011
Posted by TiE Boston- "The Network for Entrepreneurs" in Entrepreneurship, General, Life Sciences & Healthcare, News and Views, Technology, Uncategorized.Tags: breakthrough technology, engineering, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, idea, India, Indian scientist, Innovation, intellectual property rights, IPR, legends & leaders, Legends and Leaders, life science, low cost, Masheklar, mit, product innovation, R.A. Mashelkar, science & technology, speaker tie, Technology, TiE, TiE-Boston
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On October 4, 2011, eminent scientist and scholar, Dr. Raghunath A. Mashelkar, will be speaking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management about Innovation’s Holy Grail: Getting More from Less for Many.
Ever imagine a new car for under $2000, a refrigerator for $69, or even a cataract surgery for $30? Probably not. But thanks to Mashelkar’s push to innovate through clever engineering, even the most expensive products have been brought into the realm of the possible for everyone.
He has been propagating a balanced culture of innovation and intellectual property rights for over a decade. His efforts led to the growing awareness of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in India. He successfully challenged the US patents on Basmati rice, Turmeric and Neem, setting up new paradigms in the protection of traditional knowledge base which led to the set up of India’s first Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.
Thanks to Mashelkar, using ancient recipes that have been passed down from mother to daughter for generations does not fall under patent infringement. Just like Gandhi stood up to the British against tax on salt, Mashelkar stood up to the corporations trying to patent Indian staple items. Maybe that’s why his model for innovation is called “Gandhian engineering.”
Mashelkar has said that India is the land of ideas and the US is the land of opportunity. It is no surprise then that he would take such an active and critical role in shaping India’s reform policies in Science & Technology, Auto Fuels, IPR, Telecom and Higher Education in order to change India from the land of ideas to the land of opportunity.
To hear from a man who overcame poverty to become one of the most decorated Indian scientists with over 50 awards and medals at national and international levels is sure to make you think and maybe even inspire you to innovate in a new way.
Don’t pass up the opportunity to hear Mashelkar discuss innovation and creating breakthrough technologies on October 4 at MIT.
GreenGoose: A True Story of Living the Entrepreneurial Dream – By Mike Grandinetti March 4, 2011
Posted by TiE Boston- "The Network for Entrepreneurs" in Angel investing, Entrepreneurship, funding, Gaming, Technology, Uncategorized.Tags: Betaspring, Bill Warner, Brian Krejcarek, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Gaming, GreenGoose, idea, Innovation, Mike Grandinetti, Southboro Capital, startup, Technology, TiE, TiE-Boston, young entrepreneur
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For GreenGoose the journey from Oregon to Providence, RI to Kendall Square in Cambridge and finally to the inaugural Launch Conference, held on 23-24 of February at the San Francisco Design Concourse, has been an intense and ultimately rewarding one. From Betaspring to mentoring from Bill Warner at the Cambridge Innovation Center to now back to Oregon and San Francisco, his is the classic entrepreneurial story of how hard work, frugality, determination to see your vision realized and confronting your fears all combine to produce a successful outcome. For a young entrepreneur like Brian, having the support of a group of mentors and advisors along the way gave him the courage and confidence to keep moving forward despite moments of self-doubt.
Founder Brian Krejcarek has been a self described tinkerer since his childhood in Orgeon. He has been building physical things for as long as he can remember, and until this week, his most noteworthy creation was a cabin that he built in the woods near his home. Based on the overwhelmingingly positive reaction that he engendered amongst some of the US’ most prestigious and prolific angel investors, founders and entrepreneurs this past week (both on the grand jury and in the audience at Jason Calcanis’ very successful reformulation of what had perviously been known as the Tech Crunch 50), this is no longer the case. As of Thursday night Pacific Time, it is absolutely clear that GreenGoose now easily qualifies as Brian’s most impressive achievement to date. Like every success story, this one was not without its challenges.
Brian decided to come to the Northeast to advance his idea, looking for a program to provide him with mentoring and capital. Ultimately, he was connected to Betaspring, a mentor driven accelerator program for technology and design engineers which is based in Providence, Rhode Island and is a member of the TechStars Network. Brian met with Owen Johnson and the leadership team of Betaspring, was accepted into the program, and had second thoughts at least twice before finally heading to New England to participate in the twelve week program. Brian was very hesitant to leave his home state and his beloved lifestyle. Ultimately, his desire to build a great company and to change the world won out.
Brian showed up in Providence with his trademark green crewneck sweater – the same one he wore on sage at Launch in the photo above – and a very rough design realization of his vision of making a fun game platform for doing things in the real world. The approach is to use very low cost wireless sensors embedded in stickers that can be placed on toys, water bottles, tooth brushes, dental floss, cereal boxes, skate boards and bicycles. Its both for young kids and families but also applies to “big kids” and can be played on the web as well as Facebook and Twitter or on your mobile device. Brian applied himself diligently during the Betaspring program, applying the lessons conveyed by his mentors and refining the system design.
Upon successful completion of the program, Brian moved to Cambridge and started working out of the Cambridge Innovation Center. It was there that he quickly caught the attention of Bill Warner, Founder of Avid Technology and Wildfire and more recently, a prolific angel investor and tireless supporter of entrepreneurs. Bill has been on a mission to mobilize the Boston angel community and was instrumental in bringing TechStars and the Open Angel Forum to Boston.
Bill is a system designer, and when he passed by Brian’s working area he was immediately captivated, as Brian was not staring into a laptop but an oscilloscope – an instrument that was far more common during the historic minicomputer era in New England than in today’s mobile app and web 3.0 world.
Bill sat down with Brian, and the young entrepreneur educated the master on the state of the art of low cost sensor and accelerometer design. Within an hour Bill was completely hooked and became Brian’s first investor. Of course, as many people know, along with Bill’s money comes his relentless support and encouragement. Given Bill’s increasing national visibility as an evangelist for angel investing, he was invited by Jason Calacanis as one of just two Boston area investors to join the Grand Jury at Launch.
Soon after, Bill immediately started encouraging Brian to begin to accelerate his product development so that he could be ready in time for the Launch event. Owen and the Betaspring team provided their own push. Brian was far from confident that he could pull it off. The push from Bill and Betaspring combined to convince Brian to go for it. By all accounts, Brian has spent the past several months literally working around the clock to make the deadline. According to Nick Tomarello, another Launch company stage presenter and Bill Warner protege, Brian is often at the CIC working until 5AM. As Brian shared with me at the event, he has barely slept in months.
When I met Brian at the event, I was struck by several things. First, his personality. He is quiet and unassuming and he has a very boyish enthusiasm. Brian is also maniacally focused on placing every discretionary dollar into the product. His green soft cover briefcase was badly scuffed and the handle was held together by duct tape. He told me that his grandmother gave him $50 so that he could buy a new briefcase. Of course, the cash was immediately spent on the business (sorry Grandma). His baggy green sweater – the same one he showed up with in Providence – now had dark elbow patches which were a recent addition. This guy is clearly not very concerned about fashion and it clearly did not matter.
Brian was initially not slated to present on stage – he was one of many companies relegated to the Launch Pad or what is affectionately called the Demo Pit. A little push from Bill Warner and other members of the jury ultimately won the day – and it gave Brian the opportunity to find his way onto the stage and to forever change the trajectory of his young company.
When he took the stage very late in the day the jury had already sat through over twenty presentations. It would have been understandable if they had lost some of their mental energy and focus. Then, something remarkable happened – as Brian described GreenGoose, he absolutely captivated the audience – and the jury – with his pitch and his demo.
Brian simulated the motion of brushing his teeth – where a tiny sensor with an abundance of battery power – translates the motion of the toothbrush into a message that is wirelessly transmitted to the base station and publishes a record of the completed activity online. He then proceeded to demo other activities, like taking vitamins and drinking water, with a similar result.
The implications of the demo were made clear – GreenGoose enables people to get lifestyle points for each activity they undertake in pursuit of a healthy goal. The company’s tagline is “Play Real Life Even Better”. We have all read about the Internet of Things for a while now – and IBM’s Smart Planet ubiquitous campaign has made the concept mainstream. GreenGoose is an elegantly simple and highly practical early realization of the idea. The audience got it and boisterously vocalized their support. The jury’s reaction was immediate.
It was a particularly compelling demo considering so many of the other companies were playing the execution game in the social / mobile / geo-location space. In this case, there was real technology under the hood. As several of the more technical members of the jury noted, what GreenGoose has delivered is by no means easy. They are pushing the boundaries of deploying low cost sensors and accelerometers (the sensors are approximately 45 cents per piece with the product now in pre-production in low cost China).
A humbled Calacanis was asked how he could have possibly missed this one.
Give Jason credit for admitting in front of the audience that he and his screening team had erred by not green lighting GreenGoose to the elite group of 50 presenting companies. Jason then quickly took the offensive to compensate for his rare miss (the Conference was extraordinary), and began exhorting the jury to commit on stage to investing in GreenGoose. He simultaneously pushed Brian to make his deal terms explicit. Within a very brief period, both Shervin Pishevar, Founder of WebOS and currently CEO of SGN and an angel investor in Plancast, Gowalla and Aardvark (acquired by Google) and Jay Levy had each committed to invest $50K in the company. This is simply something that you do not see happen in Boston. The audience went wild.
In a short period of time, VentureBeat picked up the story and erroneously reported that GreenGoose had raised $100 million dollars on stage. Despite the bubble in Silicon Valley, this was a three order of magnitude miss was particularly noteworthy. On day 2 of the Conference, Brian spent much of the day in back-to-back meetings with various investors at the conference. Bill Warner was at his side for many of these meetings. The GreenGoose demo station was visibly – but quite understandably vacant.
As the conference was wrapping up, the Grand Jury handed out a Series of Awards. GreenGoose won the well deserved award for Best Overall Company to Emerge from the Launchpad.
During the wrap-up, Bill announced that he expected GreenGoose to close on additional $400K in investment by end of day, Friday, bringing GreenGoose’s raise to a half million dollars. For Brian, it was an incredible validation of his venture and a huge push forward. Maybe now he can finally replace his beat up briefcase before his grandmother figures out what he did with the really money.
Click Here to read this article on BostInnovation’s website
Editor’s Note:
Mike Grandinetti, a serial entrepreneur across five software start-ups, is currently the Managing Director of Southboro Capital and is an active Mentor in TechStars, the Founders Institute, SeedCamp Europe and IBM SmartCamp. He is an active judge and mentor in Mass Challenge and served for many years as a judge in the MIT $100K. He served as a mentor at the recently completed Launch Conference in San Francisco.
Conversation with Kanwal Rekhi, Veteran Angel Investor & Founder of TiE – By Vanita Shastri February 8, 2011
Posted by TiE Boston- "The Network for Entrepreneurs" in Angel investing, Entrepreneurship, funding, Uncategorized.Tags: angel investing, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, founder, Innovation, mentoring, startup, success, successful, TiE, TiE Angels, TiE-Boston, venture capital funding
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I had the opportunity to have a great conversation over coffee with serial entrepreneur and veteran Angel Investor, Kanwal Rekhi on his trip to Boston in November, 2010. He was with us to inaugurate the TiE Angels group at TiE-Boston. He shared with me his views on entrepreneurship, mentoring and more…
On People
There are 3 types of people, those that fight change; they are usually brushed aside; second, those that adopt to change; they are the ones who work for you; and those that cause the change, these are the entrepreneurs!
On Entrepreneurship
No one will give you the chance to become an entrepreneur but yourself. So you have to decide to take the plunge on your own! The path of an entrepreneur is very lonely and hard. Giving up that comfortable job is very tough, especially if you are also married and have had a taste for settled life.
Society does not support you, as well. No one from outside will encourage you to become an entrepreneur; they in fact will think you are odd, wasting your time, etc. Once you succeed of course they all come and tell you that, “they knew all along you had it in you to make it.”
On the difference between Entrepreneurs and Managers
Entrepreneurs are disrupters, innovators, restless; they cannot sit still until they have worked out the idea that is driving them sleepless. An entrepreneur thrives in chaos; he/she is not happy with a 5% improvement but works on 5x or 10x change on the frontier. Entrepreneurs have a totally different mindset and thrive in times of rapid change. Thus, I think entrepreneurs have a huge advantage today as the internet is rearranging the economy worldwide.
Managers on the other hand are stream liners, they stream line the process – do not like disruption, and they make incremental improvements and want everything to run smoothly.
Managers have a tough time becoming an entrepreneur but the reverse is true as well. The process of transition from an entrepreneur to manager, once an entrepreneur has created an exciting company, is hard. Entrepreneurs do not settle down and that is why often the entrepreneur needs to move on and create the next thing that has started to consume his attention.
First principles of Entrepreneurship
“Being an engineer, I always went back to first principles.” As an entrepreneur you must focus on the value to the customer, on something the customer needs now! Price does not relate to cost but to value. If there is a demand for the value, the entrepreneur can price the product accordingly. Customer needs to be given the best and a reliable solution but they need to pay for it as well. Once you have that, the entrepreneur can price the product accordingly especially if your solution is the only game in town.
On Failure
Failure is absolutely a part of entrepreneurship. In this journey there are several things you need to learn, a great deal of sensitization that takes place. In the world of entrepreneurship the one who lasts out the others, the one who survives is the one who is likely to succeed. Even if you fail the first time, get out and do it the second time, third time, as the odds only get better each time.
But it’s important that the entrepreneur who has failed asks the right questions and is honest with himself. While entrepreneurs are wild, passionate and difficult to pin down, they must hold themselves accountable. They must develop milestones that they set for themselves and benchmark their progress to those to keep them on even heel.
In the face of failure, the entrepreneur should not say, “I failed because my engineer did not get the product out on time, or I failed because I lost an order and customer, or I failed because the investors pulled out the money.”
Instead, if an entrepreneur fails, he should have a mindset that says, “I was not smart enough to see that my VP of engineering was falling behind and he needed help. I failed because I was not able to see that my customer was not satisfied or that I was not able to convince the investors to stay on.” An entrepreneur should have both short term and long term goals and build a road map that tells him he is on track.
Entrepreneurship is not for everyone
Not everyone needs to be entrepreneur; it has to come from within. You have to find a way to de-stabilize yourself. Find a way to step out of the comfort zone. Going without a salary for a year or two is hard. Only 1-2% of people take the plunge to be entrepreneurs, once you do that the odds against you improve. And each time you try, the odds only get better. If you do well the upside is unlimited.
The Journey
When Kanwal took the plunge as an entrepreneur, he was one of the first engineers from India in Silicon Valley to do so and thus was a path breaker. It was a very lonely journey wherein he often heard that Indians were nerds; good at engineering and that he should stay in the back office and continue to build products. He was also very comfortable, had a settled life but got “de-stabilized” when one of his colleagues left to start a company.
Kanwal developed a completely new disruptive technology solution at the time and the rest is history. But he had the painful task of self learning the nuts and bolts of entrepreneurship. He soon realized that he would not succeed because he was working hard or that he was smart (because there were many like that) but because he could design and build a valuable solution that did not exist until then and better still had a lead of a few years with little competition.
On Exits
Building a company is not for every entrepreneur. Scaling up the operations to national, multi-national, applying the distribution and financial muscle are skills that every entrepreneur may not develop along the way. In such case the entrepreneur is better off handing over the key role to others. The entrepreneur, as the innovator, is better off consolidating their value and continues onwards. In most cases the routine also becomes mundane for an entrepreneur and in those scenarios they move on to do something new, innovate and create value in new markets.
On TiE
From his own experience, Kanwal became a strong advocate for entrepreneurship. He founded TiE with the purpose to encourage and inspire others to become entrepreneurs. Eventually the decision to become an entrepreneur comes from within, but having role models, mentors and teachers is of tremendous benefit, that is what TiE set out to do.
TiE’s influence has been to inspire people to take the first step. It becomes easier when you have role models, people who tell their stories and it sparks others; the idea is to de-stabilize folks.
On Mentoring
Entrepreneurs must find mentors who have been through the process themselves, those who have been a founder or part of a founding team, only then does it provide intrinsic value. As Kanwal put it, “The thing about knowledge is that it takes 20-30-40 years to accumulate, but if you share it you don’t lose anything. But the other person gains a lot from your experience. Thus, there is a huge benefit for entrepreneurs just from interacting with experienced entrepreneurs.” That is the platform TiE provides and its lasting value of bringing mentors to the aspiring entrepreneur!
For him, becoming a mentor, a teacher, and an investor, has been a very enjoyable journey. As the world is changing rapidly, we find entrepreneurship exciting, its needs must be aligned with the changing times! That is why the work of TiE and its mentors is so crucial!
Vanita Shastri is the Executive Director of TiE-Boston, the second largest chapter of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) that Fosters Entrepreneurship globally through mentoring networking and education. She has a Ph.D. from Cornell University and has actively taught courses on International Entrepreneurship, Business in India, and Indic Civilization. She has also been a policy consultant at Harvard University and worked for Redwood Investment Systems, Inc. where she directed their global operations. Vanita has also founded two non-profit organizations, including the Meru Education Foundation and the Habitat Learning Center in Delhi, India.
