Jolly's Volley: The Arc of Serendipity, My Personal Story

?

Every time I attend an event or meet a new set of folks (like I did recently in New York), I am almost always asked the question: “How did you become a VC?” The answer honestly is pure serendipity. There are certain people who are extremely well planned…who know exactly the path they will take and where they will be 5, 10, or even 20 years from today (or at least they think they do). I am not one of those people. My entire journey, personal and professional has been on the rails of pure happenstance. Given how interesting, and hopefully different my life story has been, I thought it might be educational and insightful to create a personal blog on the topic. So here it is…my personal step-function laden journey, thanks to multiple lightning strikes, metaphorically speaking, of course.

?

I was born in Ludhiana in the state of Punjab in India. At the age of 2, my parents moved to Delhi where my mom was a nurse and dad worked for Indian Airlines at what used to be called Palam Airport (now Indira Gandhi International or IGI). In the late 70’s and early 80’s, there was a dearth of medical personnel in the US, and the U.S. State Department essentially sent out a blanket invitation to global medical professionals asking them to immigrate to the US to help bridge the gap. A couple of my mom’s colleagues from E.S.I. Hospital in Delhi knew about the U.S. invitation (my mom did not:)), and encouraged mom to join them as they visited the US Embassy to fill out some preliminary paperwork. Ironically, my mom’s application was accepted while her colleagues were rejected (serendipity #1). In other words, the person (my mom) who was not even supposed to be applying for an accelerated visa to the US, ended up doing just that.

?

The family decided to immigrate to the US in 1983. We eventually settled near South Central Los Angeles. I attended a junior high school with meaningful gang activity among the Bloods and Crips, two main groups in the region (which presented a very different version of America than one would usually see on the marketing collateral). Mom started as a nurse’s aid at $3.35/hr (minimum wage at the time). She eventually earned her Licensed Vocation Nurse (LVN) license, and we moved to the town of Santa Fe Springs southeast of LA. The “Springs” in the name, at that time, did not represent some pristine paradise with rolling hills and a valley of flowers. Rather, it used to be a fairly large oil field with many sizable oil extracting machines (the likes of which still line parts of California). I attended Santa Fe High School which, at that time, had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in California! I know what you are thinking…No, that metric was neither the attraction for me nor did I contribute to it in any way. Seriously, however, imagine a sheltered 14 year-old ending up at a high school with an onsite day care center having a full time staff of 3-4 caring for 15-20 infants. And, as you can imagine, there were several pregnant high school students attending classes as well. Growing up in India, and given dad’s role with Indian Airlines, I fell in love with aviation. I wanted to study aerospace engineering and realized that the #1 school in the country for that major was MIT. I decided during my senior year to apply. My college counselor told me that no one in the school’s 35 year history had ever applied to MIT. They did not have any materials on MIT at the small room that served as a combination of counselor’s office and college center. I remember asking my Economics teacher, Mr. Belzowski, for a reference as part of my MIT application. Much to my surprise, Mr. Belzowski responded, “son, why are you applying to a military school?” He had no idea what MIT was! I respectfully withdrew my request and asked my English teacher, Ms. Traub, to write the recommendation instead. That curve ball by Mr. Belzowski turned out to be a boon (serendipity #2). It turns out Ms. Traub was the only teacher throughout my high school career to have given me a B grade. I found out later that she handwrote a 5-page recommendation letter, and the effort/care that she put in writing that document likely made a difference. Essentially, her letter convinced the admission committee at MIT to take a chance on me, even though Santa Fe High clearly did not offer me the kind of academic foundation I would have required to thrive at an institution like MIT at that time. By the way, the dean of admissions from MIT sent a hand-written response to Ms. Traub for her thoughtful and detailed reference.

?

At MIT, I struggled terribly, especially during my first year. I did not have Physics Honors or Calculus, or computer literacy to prepare me for the rigor of MIT. Heck, I had never seen a computer mouse in my life until I got to MIT in 1987. Thankfully, MIT employed a policy of Pass/Fail rather than grades during freshman year. I realized after some reflection that the policy was in place probably for cases like mine, where kids came from very different and under-prepared backgrounds but had the underlying talent and desire to succeed, and simply needed time to get through the transient first year. As a kid with no financial means, I relied exclusively on loans, grants, and work-study programs to get through college. After the tough first year, I thrived and ended up getting both a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Aeronautics and Astronautics. Growing up, I wanted to be an engineer for either Boeing or NASA as my dream jobs. I got offers from both in 1991. I still remember that NASA was a $22k/year gig, while Boeing was a lofty $25.5k/year in compensation. But serendipity struck again (Serendipity #3), and one of my Aero-Astro professors (Manuel Martinez-Sanchez) ended up getting a NASA Space Grant towards the end of my senior year, and asked if I would do some propulsion research for my Master’s thesis instead of joining NASA or Boeing as an employee. I became a NASA Space Grant Fellow, and ended up experimenting with electric rockets at the Air Force Rocket Lab at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

?

The job market was tough in the early 90’s in the Aerospace industry. I was fortunate to get a role with a company called Itek Optical Systems outside of Boston. Itek, as it turns out, was a F500 companies back in the 70’s making vases, and eye glasses in addition to high end optics for space and defense applications. The company was founded by Boston University professors in the 60’s to spy on the Sputnik, and specialized in the design and manufacturer of high-resolution reconnaissance systems (spy cameras) for the US military. The company had invented “adaptive optics” where piezoelectric materials could be used to push and pull on large mirrors (think large ground based large telescopes) to compensate for atmospheric disturbance. That technology is crucial for space based telescopes like Hubble and James Webb. Speaking on Hubble, I was (a small) part of the Itek team that helped fix the Hubble telescope in the mid 90’s. I was by the far the youngest person at Itek, as they had not hired anyone for a few years before I joined them. During my 4-year tenure there, the company went from 500+ employees to 110 people, as a result of shrinking defense budgets. I realized then that I had to control my own destiny and needed to shift into a different domain.

?

Around that time, a friend of mine asked me to join her for an information session for the UCLA Anderson School in Boston that she was attending. Even though I was more a bystander and not really considering business school actively, I was convinced by the Anderson Dean of Admissions to apply (serendipity #4). I ended up attending Anderson focusing on technology management and entrepreneurship. I did not know what I wanted to do during the summer between the two years of business school. One afternoon, I was simply perusing some company collateral at the career center when a gentleman came next to me and started making small talk. Turns out that he was from Epson America, and his 2 pm appointment had cancelled at the last minute. We ended up speaking for an hour informally, and he asked me to join Epson for the summer, which I did (Serendipity #5). I ended up working on a project for Epson to think about this new thing called the Internet and how it was going to disrupt their business, especially sales. Keith, who recruited me, is now the CEO of Epson America and we are still friends almost 30 years later.

?

A year later, came yet another key milestone as I pondered the question of what I wanted to do after Anderson. I actually did not know. Epson wanted me back, but I did not want to be part of a large Japanese conglomerate (Epson is part of Seiko). I ended up running into one of my classmates in the cafeteria and while we were discussing our respective next steps, he suggested that I speak with Mattel, the toy company based in El Segundo close to UCLA. I told him that I did not really want to be part of a large company. He mentioned that Mattel had a small group of MIT people who were looking at innovation and new technologies (Serendipity #6). I reached out to Doug Glen, the Chief Strategy Officer at Mattel at the time. Doug agreed to meet. He offered me a role as part of his strategy group who were basically three MIT folks (Doug himself graduated in the late 60’s from MIT). The group’s charter was to interact with bleeding edge technologists at places like Carnegie Mellon, MIT Media Lab, Dean Kamen’s DEKA Foundation etc to see if technologies from those institutions could be embedded in toys of the future. The claim to fame at Mattel was being part of a small team that launched Intel-Play, a joint venture between Mattel and Intel (Andy Grove wanted to get Intel into applications beyond just providing x86 chips).

?

While I was at Mattel, I got a cold call from Guy Kawasaki, the legendary marketer who was hired by Steve Jobs to evangelize the Macintosh back in the 80’s (Serendipity #7). Guy had co-founded Garage.com, an online boutique investment bank for seed stage technology companies. It turns out that one of my Anderson classmates, Barbara, became pen pals with Guy while she was in business school (yes, when pen-pals was a thing:)). Barbara had recommended me to Guy as a potential addition to the growing Garage team. I ended up packing a U-haul truck and driving up to Silicon Valley from LA to join Guy and Garage in 1999. That was a roller coaster 8 year run. Garage filed to go public in 2001, but pulled the S-1 after the dot com bubble burst. The firm went from almost 70 people globally to a handful in Palo Alto. With the investment banking business finished, we had to pivot. We did so, to a seed stage VC firm (Garage Technology Ventures). So, ladies and gentlemen, I am an accidental venture capitalist!!

?

Serendipity continued. A few years into the investing role, I realized that almost every one of our seeded companies was working closely with the IT services companies in India, the so-called SWITCH companies (Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL). I convinced my partners, Guy and Bill Reichert, to let me explore the possibility of speaking with those same IT services firms as potential LPs for Garage’s second fund. This was late 2006. While it was early for many of the corporates to consider venture capital as an asset class, during my visit I was asked to speak at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Serendipity hit yet again as I was asked to judge a business plan competition during my ISB visit. ?Sitting next to me on the panel was Raj Atluru, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ, Tim Draper’s firm) at the time. When I asked him what he was doing in Hyderabad, he mentioned that Tim Draper and he had been investing in India for the past few years, remotely. Now, DFJ had raised a sizable fund, and they were looking to hire a partner for India, in case I knew anyone who might qualify (serendipity #8). My response, off the cuff, was “why don’t you think of me!”. And that led to my joining DFJ a few months later and moving with the family to India in summer of 2007. Unfortunately, both Tim and Raj left DFJ to pursue other opportunities. With that loss of sponsorship, I had no choice but to move back to DFJ, the mother ship in Menlo Park in 2012. I was managing the India portfolio from the US during early mornings and late nights, while investing in US based startups during the day, effectively having two full time jobs. Serendipity struck again in early 2015 when, during one of my Bangalore trips, my partner Anand Prasanna approached me to pitch the idea of Iron Pillar, which he had been thinking about for a couple of years. Anand and I had met briefly during his time at Sequoia India while I was leading DFJ India in the late 2000’s. He was looking for someone who had been a partner on the ground both in India and the US, and realized that universe was fairly small:) He wanted me to be part of the founding team at Iron Pillar (serendipity #9). We ‘dated’ throughout 2015, meeting companies and pulling the team together, formally launching Iron Pillar in January, 2016!

?

So, while the journey from Ludhiana ==> Delhi ==> South Central LA ==> Cambridge/Boston ==> LA ==> Palo Alto ==> Bangalore ==> Palo Alto has been anything but straightforward, the inflections have been driven, more often than not, by complete serendipity. I have had either the courage or foolishness to embrace those lightning strikes and jumped onto the opportunities. So, when I am approached by young kids graduated from college and business schools asking how they can become a VC, I honestly tell them that based on my experience, there isn’t a prescriptive mechanism. There are, however, two simple rules that I live my life by – 1) surround yourself with brilliant people (mind and heart) as often as possible; and 2) given unconditionally (help when you can). Those two bits have served me well, and in my mind justify the positive karma that I have been blessed with.