India’s young entrepreneurs can now hope to visit and connect with like minded entrepreneurs, mentors and seed investors in Silicon Valley, California with the creation of Startup Corridor between India and the US.
The Startup Corridor is the brain child of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Asha Jadeja Motwani, wife of late Stanford Professor Rajeev Motwani, one of the respected computer scientists.
Rajeev Motwani who was a mentor to the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was also a key architect of the algorithms that power Google today. Jadeja Motwani is an investor in over 75 start ups in Silicon Valley and has just begun seed investing in Indian start ups.
The idea for a corridor sparked off when, “I met several bright young entrepreneurs in India pursuing excellent ideas and experiments but without the kind of mentoring that is so common in Silicon Valley. Reading and talking about this kind of mentoring in abstract can take one forward only so much. Unless the entrepreneurs understand the culture, the walk, and the talk of Silicon Valley, serious dialogue was unlikely to emerge,” says Jadeja Motwani.
Thus was born the Rajeev Circle Fellowship program. The idea behind this program is simple. Identify a dozen or so true entrepreneurs in India and fly them as a group to visit Silicon Valley for two weeks. All expenses paid. Any expectations of returns? Nope says Jadeja Motwani, “Just pay it forward." If the visiting fellows help and encourage the batches that will visit after them, "that's reward enough".
As part of the fellowship, the selected entrepreneurs were invited for an intense two-week plunge in Silicon Valley. The Fellows got to meet tech wizards and angel investors, including Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square and Marc Andreessen the whizkid creator of the browser! They also visited and had in depth discussions with the Stanford Design School, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Jaw Bone, AirBnb and TechCrunch Disrupt winner Get Around. Outside of formal meetings, the Fellows were encouraged to "hang out and work" at Silicon Valley’s famous cafes on University Ave in Palo Alto.
According to Jadeja Motwani, this 10 block stretch of downtown Palo Alto is so packed with famous valley angels and entrepreneurs that "you cannot toss a chalk here without hitting one".
The entrepreneurs for the first round of this fellowship included incubatees from IIM-A, IIT, Ahmedabad's National Institute of Design (NID) and Kochi's Startup Village.
Besides Sanjay Vijayakumar, the Chairman of the Startup Village Board of Governors, the three others from Kerala were Sijo Kuruvilla George (CEO, Startup Village & Co-founder of MobME), Deepak Ravindran (Founder and CEO, Innoz Technologies) and Mohammed Hisamuddin (co-founder and CIO, Innoz).
This first batch of the Fellows will be instrumental in identifying, selecting and grooming the next set that will be visiting the Silicon Valley next year. "Asha wants to build and continue the Fellowship programme for at least 10 entrepreneurs every year for next few years and we will be helping her team every step of the way," said Vijayakumar.
‘Rajeev Circle’, a gathering of accomplished entrepreneurs in the tech world, is held every two months by Prof Motwani's ex students and entrepreneur friends. With around 250 members, including professors from Berkeley and Stanford and Founders of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and VMWare, it is regarded as a powerful brainstorming event in the tech world.
During their visit, the entrepreneurs met a host of IT wizards like Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and Space X; Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape who currently manages over Rs 14,000 crore through his Venture Fund Andreessen Horowitz; Ram Shriram and Ron Conway, Valley's top angel investors, and Stanford CS Professors Andrew Ng and Ashish Goel.
