The engine of SV shines bright!

I was at TiECon last week in the Silicon Valley. As I was reflecting on my experience at the conference, after having returned to India, I was taking a stroll on the beach, and observed that if I came to a standstill I would quickly experience a slight imbalance each time the waves hit my feet and took away the foundational sand from underneath me, so much so that I would inevitably need to shift my feet to another location. It was next to impossible for me to stand still. I felt the sea was giving me a message: that this is how the world works where everything is dynamic and ephemeral, and that nothing is permanent or eternal. Therefore, key to being a guest in this universe is for us to bring forth our individuality to create something "new", it could be a new dance, a painting, a book, a podcast, a blog, a consulting business, a cafe, a new recipe, or a tiny technical feature that no one will ever talk about, or... a giant unicorn that everyone will talk about. Big, small, valuable or invisible it just doesn't matter at the end of the day because the impact was something "net new"...and, it mattered, to YOU!

Now, that is entrepreneurship.

The power of community is key here, and that is the very reason TiE originated - due to the pains felt by the South Indian entrepreneurial community in the early Silicon Valley days back then there were no entrepreneurial role models.

Since then, over the last 3 decades, TiE has been key to spurring innovation through out the Silicon Valley and now the rest of the world, and what better time to have it's first annual Silicon Valley based conference in over 3y - at a time when folks are miserable and caught up in the cyclical downturn - ... stress, anxiety and fear is contagious and floating around.

This conference was an oasis, a supercharger pitstop, for all the entrepreneurs who made it from far and wide and a reminder that, "this too shall pass". The theme of this years conference was, “Dream. Believe. Achieve.” I would be remiss to not mention the seamless logistics and organization of the conference - all driven through an inspiring volunteer driven culture, best described by TiE Silicon Valley President, Anita Manwani here...

It was fitting that the Silicon Valley based US Congressman Ro Khanna was on hand as well to catch onto the excitement ...

Entrepreneurs are possessed and have the ability to distort reality - they're not in it for wealth creation but for the art of doing it, for the journey, and the outcome is just icing on the cake and Jeff Hoffman , Chairman of Global Entrepreneurship Network, re-inforced this message with his phenomenal keynote where he talked about the power of entrepreneurship, the importance of passion vs. the need to collect a paycheck and above all, the visioning and positive thinking required.

Case in point, he as a child was living in poverty, and there was little chance of breaking out and fulfilling his goal of traveling the world and having dinner with 50 families in 50 countries. But, he wrote his goal down on his bathroom mirror, saw it everyday, studied the travel industry and solved a real problem thereby become valuable to key players via founding Priceline. Lo and behold, he travelled the world and more.

What I found most inspiring is, even after all his success, his attitude is, “Success is not a destination. It’s a platform that allows you to do the work that really matters” which is why he now gives back to the field of entrepreneurship via the Global Entrepreneurship Network - and he sees it as a humble exchange for the many blessings he has received. What a role model!

It is not a surprise that entrepreneurs flock to community hubs around the world to take in the energy, to be with like minded people and get inspired, in order to create. It is a selfless form of living in the grand scheme of things where the buck keeps getting passed down from generation to generation. One great example of a beneficiary is Surbhi Sarna , a purpose driven entrepreneur who sold her company for $275M. There is a lot to learn from her journey and what stood out for me is how she kept moving through the low moments, the imposter syndrome as a female entrepreneur, and the self doubt that would creep in as a result.?

She shared that what kept her going, interestingly,?was allowing, and empowering her mentors - those who saw something in her in those moments when she couldn’t see it in herself - to inspire and nurture her. “If someone sees something in you, let it happen”, she said and she shared how it is so easy to fall into the social craze trap to find the ‘bright and shiny’ mentors that everyone wants to associate themselves with, but rather sometimes the people one most needs, "are the ones right in front you" - and maybe it is them that are the best ones for you - especially in the start! What simple, yet profound, wisdom!

Another key lesson that stood out for me from Surbhi's journey was how during the fundraising process, (when after over 50 ‘no’s’ from VCs she pitched to and admittedly, she stopped counting after 50 so who knows how many actually she got )...By the way, on that note, one of the the prevailing conversations/questions is what is going on with VCs and the temperature of the funding environment, how should startups think about it, and I caught up with Gowri Shankar , a seasoned VC who was able to provide a calming voice of reason for entrepreneurs out there...

...Anyhow, with Surbhi, after 50+ "nos" she demonstrated sacrifice and perseverance by promising to forgo salary for 2 years and move in with her parents until the next raise which she promised was when she would pay herself. The lesson here isn’t to bend backwards, forgoe salary, or to give up your apartment and move in with your parents - that worked in her specific context but may not for others - actually the lesson here is perseverance and creativity - in order to do what it takes. Where there is a will there is a way. Jeff Hoffman 's quote rings true here: “Entrepreneurship is the toolset of self-determination”.?

It is fitting that now Surbhi is taking her new role as a Group Partner at YC very seriously where she sees herself as a gatekeeper for the early phase startups. She is truly an entrepreneur whisperer and someone who’s vibe I am convinced needs to be multiplied over and over again and spread through out the world - no joke- oh and by the way, she’s a UC Berkeley grad, just sayin’. On that positive note, it was wonderful to see Silicon Valley Bank, after a giant scare, back in full force, with the ubiquitous Priya Rajan spreading her magnetic energy and inspiring the entrepreneurial community ...

TiE wasn't just represented by Silicon Valley, also present was Suresh Raju, President of TiE Hyderabad, who had just recently led the amazing Global TieCon 2022 in Hyderabad, with an amazing team of pan India volunteers, which I was lucky to attend as well, and wrote about. Also present was the magnetic Minee Verma from TiE Seattle, and wonderful to see her passion and energy for building Seattle's entrepreneurial community. Talking to her made me want to move to Seattle...

India continued to be a hot topic, and especially in context of the geo-political situation in the world today, seems like experts and executives are bearish on China, and bullish on India. Sudhir Sethi gave an impassioned talk and shared five key trends shaping the rapid march of digital adoption in India:

1. Emergence of Digital Public Infra to unlock digical inclusion at population scale
2. Rise of investment boosting digital economy
3. Advent of 5G data speeds
4. Multi-lingual, conversation AI technologies to capture the next wave of internet users
5. Population scale (UPI, ONDC) digital enabled omni-channel markets

Punit Thakkar , the CEO of Google Cloud's top partner in APAC and India, Shivaami , provided his perspective in this context - and it certainly affirms how Indian companies are well on their way towards adopting cloud native to boost their digital muscle...

Punit and his team, alongside the other hyperscalers, are targeting a plethora of use cases in India. For example, and I had no idea of this, but India has a startling backlog of about 100yrs of civil and legal cases , (which are very language intensive), which are yet to be adjudicated and applying AI to this challenge , by going through documents and doing some other very manual and time intensive pre-work to short circuit?the adjudication process can be quite impactful towards shedding past baggage holding the country back. There are many other sure use cases to propel the country forward and it is quite exciting to see the potential towards increasing the productivity of people! Case in point, the team from Suzuki - India’s top car manufacturer for decades now - who are focussed on building in India and accelerating an India Japan corridor was on hand to partake in the conference…?

Canada was a major sponsor of the convention, sending multiple representatives to the conference to schmooze and entice startup collaboration. There was also representation from the “Quad” ( a coalition between India, Japan, Australia, US ) - thanks to the vision of the late Japanese PM, Shinzo Abe’s brainchild from the mid 2000s. Karl Mehta was in attendance,?he is Chairman of the Quad Investors Network whose mission is to build a secure supply chain across free and democratic nations, spurring growth and prosperity in Asia.?He was bullish on India's role in the future!

To that effect, Dheeraj Pandey gave a fabulous overview of the Digital economy in India, spurring excitement for the future around India Stack - a “monster” train that has left the station on it’s way to serving 1.4B people through billions of transactions a month - powered in large part, especially in rural areas, with Reliance Jio’s $46B investment into building a data highway.?As I have mentioned in a previous post, at the root of India stack is the biometric ID, Aadhaar,?assigned to over 99% of the population - an amazing feat - and a platform for the country. India is on it’s way to becoming a giant set of APIs, case in point - he even mentioned how Government Officials in the RBI ( the equivalent of the “Fed” ) were talking about API quality, uptime and latency - who would have thought!?

Dheeraj proceeded to draw a useful analogy to the creation of the universe,?using Physics, Chemistry and Biology analogs. He likened Aadhaar as the “Big Bang”, or the creation of “Physics”. He proceeded to describe the “Chemistry” around this as the plethora of use cases around payments, finance, retail, health and many others. Finally, he drew a picture of AI/ML being the “Biology” to fuel India forward. This opens up a giant set of opportunities for innovation to figure out how to actually scale AI across the masses, especially in context of India’s 1.4B people.

At the same time, we must unequivocally draw caution, as a collective, to ensure India does it the right way by outlining some of the unique headaches of data privacy, protection, confidentiality and integrity as it related to India stack and more - as India becomes an economic power - to ensure it is done so in an equitable, grounds ups, manner. I would say that this, and all other, innovation and entrepreneurship conferences drink the India Story Kool-Aid, a “ra ra” call for innovation through technology and business use cases in India, and I look forward to the day that it cuts to a level or two beneath this surface and has discussions on these , probably financially less impactful to the Silicon Valley and broader entrepreneurial community - but societal issues at large.

Eventually the idea would be to export India Stack's best practices globally, including the AI, to serve the entire world at scale - that is the dream - and John Chambers touches on the notion that there is no 'entitlement' in context of every state in the US, and country in the world, at some point will become digital thereby levelling the playing field. Cisco under his leadership set the gold standard for creating companies, ~ 180 companies were spun out from Cisco and now he his taking this to the next level as an independent investor, where he has invested in 22 startups, 9 of which are unicorns! Here is his perspective...

Obviously, AI was a hot topic, however challenge with AI, and Generative AI specifically, is that Large Language Models (LLMs) are very compute, memory and storage intensive - and on top of that there is a pressing need to redefine data architecture, topology and models across multi-hybrid cloud setups - in order to create a uniform data platform for training. You can hear Ronen Schwartz 's point of view on this intersection of AI and the evolution of how to think about data and storage ...

Even for a large player, say a Google or Microsoft, it is prohibitively expensive to serve a query - the unit economics just don't work out. So the innovations that will arise will be around how entrepreneurs can reduce the unit economics of a query on compute, memory and storage. Ultimately, if we can serve a model off of a phone, without needing a large backend to process it, that is the holy grail.?The Juggad to this predicament is to implement decentralized AI, where AI will need to be deployed in a distributed manner at scale. This is a significant opportunity for innovation - bringing AI to the edge, to the user. This is no different to how computing evolved from mainframe to client server, and how during the internet era, compute moved towards the mobile browser, which is when true internet adoption actually occurred at scale.

Sumit Gupta painted a useful picture for AI startups to think about, in terms of their sweet spot, and he described it across four broad layers:

1. Infra / Could / Edge and Training or Serving (e.g., Open AI )
2. Tools ( optimizes and tunes models and infra )
3. Specialization ( Vertical apps, or a B2B, B2C service)
4. General companies and consumer innovations.

In the 3rd and 4th layer of Sumit's stack, success will depend on how easy it is to query but this is not a surmountable task - it is about understanding how to apply the right principles of prompt engineering, asking the right questions in order to?get the right answers. In line with Sumit's list, Debanjan Saha provided some good insight into some opportunities for startups as it relates to Generative AI...

I like Sumit's list, and in fact I would add a fifth, very explicitly, and call it "AI Security". You see, if you, as an enterprise, are from scratch using your own proprietary data, and you’re just borrowing the technique that is out there in the open source world, that is relatively clean. Any enterprise with a large amount of data can use the LLM / GenAI tech platforms from a Microsoft or a Google to create a customized model to create value for their employees and their customers.? However, there is gray area where you take an existing open source model which was already baselined based on some open public data, and then as an enterprise fine tunes it, prompt engineers it and eventually augments it with their own proprietary data, that is where there is a gray area which no one knows what could happen - that could be more messy.?This is why the intersection of AI and Cybersecurity, or the notion of Defensive AI, will be a key topic of innovation in years to come - especially as we move to a more distributed world.

All the bad actor organizations, advanced persistent hackers and outside groups, APDs etc.,?who truly are trying to create damage have an amazing amount of collaboration between themselves, they are incredibly sophisticated - and this creates an “asymmetry”. So the challenge at large, for CyberSecurity AI startups to solve, is how can an enterprise turn this asymmetry around to their advantage.

The answer lies in the notion that the bad actors don’t have an understanding of an enterprise’s internal data - which means their AI has only been trained on publicly external available data. Now, if an enterprise augments, say public GPT-4 for example, with it’s own data, all of a sudden what?is ‘normal’ from an external context may be very abnormal from an internal enterprise context - thereby raising a security flag. This is where observability and transparency is key. Ashutosh Kulkarni talks about this very succinctly here...

So based on Ashutosh's assertions, one way to think about cybersecurity is to look at it as an analytics problem - about making sure one can identify all the signals out there, whether it is data from internet, internal network, access logs, web logs, identity logs, CICD and so forth, they are all individually telling a small piece off the story. Now the key lies in being able to bring this all together, correlate across it, and build a meta-narrative to better understand questions, and using ML to detect even the weakest signals - this is the holy grail and by achieving this, an enterprise can gain significant competitive advantage through it’s defensive abilities.?In essence, the answer lies in being able to utilize the vast volumes of private data to ones advantage.

Another passionate teacher of entrepreneurship present at the conference was Sabeer Bhatia , who is undoubtedly on the Mount Rushmore of OG entrepreneurs who changed how we use the internet. Sabeer firmly believes that entrepreneurship is the way forward for the world, and I fully agree, and his unabashed determination to continue to change the world we live in, by focussing on youth education, is incredibly contagious. Check out his platform, ShowReel, which is bringing education in the form of short videos as opposed to long text.?His passion is to alleviate youth unemployment , to educate them via spurring creativity and imagination, and to enable them to be entrepreneurial participants in the digital economy...

What makes Sabeer's new project really important and interesting to me is the notion that the entire knowledge industry is in jeopardy today because of Generative AI's emergence. Industries and workforces are dealing with GenAI models that have learnt pretty much most, if not ALL, of Human knowledge available. It is just a matter of time before some really good prompt engineering and contextually appropriate algorithms emerge and disrupt the knowledge worker.

Asif Qamar provided a useful historical context, where he asked us to look back in history say 500-800y ago, the whole framework of education was to produce the "creative", the thoughtful being - the “renaissance man” so to speak. Somewhere along the industrial revolution came and it was about creating a more efficient being - perhaps due to the process intensity of industries - so our education systems taught us how to run factories, how to manage for scale, and to do repetitive tasks as part of a process.

But now Generative AI is taking over the things we used to do. The processes in enterprises are going to become commodity, and so we now need to refocus towards creating intelligent thoughtful human beings where we go back to the roots of what intelligence used to be. In the long term, Sabeer believes the world is headed into the creative economy where individuals with imagination and creativity will be more sought after than individuals with formal 'knowledge' training. Past knowledge is irrelevant now, it’s about what you do with it, and those are the kinds of thinkers and dreamers that will flourish in the next 10-20 years - and that is why Sabeer's work is so critical. To safeguard and future proof the next generation. Go Sabeer!

On these lines, if we are to make ChatPT, and other Gen AI models, applicable to the masses, especially to India's 1.4B, and eventually all the world's population, we will also need hyper localization and diverse representation in the training of the data. To understand why, let us take a step back... if you look at the zeitgeist there is an irrational exuberance of what all these Generative AI innovations can do, but there is not a lot of conversation occurring today on what it can not do. For example, scientists use long chain reasoning to come towards an answer, which a GenAI can not do so well. On top of this, there may be a hallucination effect which is very real and Sabeer was telling a story about how ChatGPT hallucinated, when asked to summarize a book he read, and it gave a completely false answer. Perhaps the most disturbing risk is that ChatGPT, (or whichever other Gen AI model), is taught based on a knowledge base that has a load of cultural baggage ( i.e., biases, racism, casteism, fears, judgements, prejudice, sexism, patriarchy, misogyny etc.) - the very thinking we are trying to evolve away from. Asif asserted that one day our kids will be learning from this very knowledge base and so the risk is that we are spreading the things we are trying to grow away from.?This is certainly a disturbing thought and something that we can't sit back and watch but proactively figure out.

This is where Lakshmi Pratury enters the picture, for the unaware she is a storyteller at scale, where she single handedly brought TED to India starting with Mysore, and the rest is history. Now she has started “INK” talks.

Her vision is for this lost original art to become ubiquitous across the country , and be made available even outside of India, and to this extent her message is for India to starting telling her stories - for India to be projected on the world stage in her own terms. This has dual benefits, one is a clear 'marketing' affect, but the other is an ability to ethnographically understand all the nooks and crannies that make up the fabric of India in order to better train LLMs to become smarter and more contextually appropriate.

Lakshmi is just touching the tip of the iceberg and I hope many many more women step up to lead, just like her. On that note, it was great to hear about Smita G. Bagla , TiE’s Global Women Chair and her vision of empowering Female entrepreneurs via mentorship and connecting to successful ‘been there, done that’ veterans of the industry. She is on her way to truly making an impact this year, and you can hear more on her vision here:?

I had published a perspective on Gender Equity some time back, and encourage you to read it - especially if you're male, but Diversity and Inclusion has been a hot topic for almost a decade, and continued to be a theme at this conference as well. On these lines, I had a chance to catch up with the amazing Papiha Nandy from Lead with Heals, a non profit focussed on mentoring and empowering women. Her belief is that the more women we empower, the better off the world will be - and I wholeheartedly agree...

There was an all women's tech panel with discussions about salary pay gaps, building diverse teams and building a culture of norms, behaviors that foster inclusion was talked about in great detail. You'd think workplaces have understood and imbibed practices by now, but we still see this catching the news even now, case in point, the recent news about Goldman Sachs.

I do hope that - in the future - conferences stop making 'women' a topic but rather a norm; in other words, why have an all women's panel? How about panels with equal distribution in the first place so by doing so , we don't need an all women's panel and we normalize gender equality as opposed to making it a 'thing' that is an exception. I think in the future, there should be a policy that every panel in must be balanced, rain or shine, regardless of who , what, why and when - that is the only way we can normalize it. There were far too many men only panels, and I am not isolating this conference only - every conference is the same - but lets start somewhere so maybe TiE can be the first!

I also had a chance to catch up with the omnipresent, veteran investor, Seema Chaturvedi , who is the effervescent evangelist of gender equality in South Asian entrepreneurship circles - you will never miss out on her in any conference you go to - and her unabashed will and gritty stamina to represent women is something very inspiring. Go Seema!

I also had a chance to learn from the star leader of the Azure Cloud team, Sudha Mahajan , who is extremely passionate about creating, and retaining, diverse teams. Her assertion is for us to think about whether the users of the AI models and products being delivered are identical to the same people who are designing it. You can hear more from her here...

Her assertion is that we need to think ahead and architect, design and develop products for a diverse audience so building inclusive teams is key as a result. But it doesn't just stop there, it is also about retention and nurture of the team: do you have the right leaders and do these people feel comfortable with their managers? Building and scaling a team is based on empathy because various cultural backgrounds are in play - we should never forget this aspect! This leads me to workplace culture, and I've written about this in detail in an earlier post, and how especially in today's times empathy is quite key. Practicing empathy is not the opposite of managing towards productivity by the way, it isn't a zero sum game, but it is a learned technique and we need more leaders like Sudha to exemplify the way for developing a culture of innovation.

In line with this, I had a good conversation with the SVP, Operations of Gillead, Joydeep Ganguly - he described the culture at Gillead where there is an allowance for Scientists to tinker, to feel safe to experiment and they do this be creating the right incentives - and metrics - to empower a relentless pursuit of perfection. Here are his thoughts on this very topic...

Joydeep also talked about some key macro trends around the workforce of the future, where future workers will be more selective of the culture they are about to enter into, and how the desire to feel impact and feel part of a larger story will be key. He also talked about expectations of how the physical workspace will make them feel - will it make them inspired, will it be a place where workers will desire to come? In this context, Khurram Sheikh was on hand, a purpose driven entrepreneur who is passionate about culture and the next-gen workplace. His goals is to build a workplace 'super app' for the enterprise where an employee can access a single pane of glass for their every need and he is well on his way to reaching it having signed on 100s of customers already onto his platform. He recently took his company CXAI public, and is growing gangbusters - he is certainly an inspiring entrepreneur! You can here him here...

On this topic of innovation, employee satisfaction, productivity, and workplace of the future, an interesting startup called HappinessFactors was on hand, with a booth dedicated towards spreading the love - and boy I felt it. I was walking through all the booths and just felt drawn to them to check them out - here you can soak in some of the beautiful energy in their booth...

In closing, it was a very full experience, and I was personally mesmerized at the energy within the South Asian Community and had an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards TiE, the volunteers, and the founding fathers. Thanks to the trail blazers, who started to give back by mentoring and investing, folks such as Vinod Khosla, Kanwal Rekhi Naren Gupta, Prabhu Goel, Suhas Patil and many others, they enabled a robust community to emerge through their own sharing of tacit entrepreneurial/ company building knowledge - THANK YOU!

For me, the spirit of entrepreneurship was very alive, and palpable, and very much proved that the engine of Silicon Valley is alive, and ferociously kicking. In closing, Anjali Banerjee couldn't have said it better ...

She ends with a tribute to the next generation of entrepreneurs with a simple, yet powerful, Thank you!

Finally, I would personally like to thank my mentor Vish Mishra for his blessings, and his spiritual leadership of the TiE community.

Thank you TiE. Thank you Entrepreneurs. LETS GO!!!