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India - News
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News Updates - 13
February 2001 The No. 1 VC on the planet - Red Herring Britain honors Ravi Shankar - CNN The Glass Palace - Washington Post WUSA's surprise package - Gurvir Dhindsa - Washington Post Putting Ford Explorer under the microscope - Business Week
SAN FRANCISCO - At a time when the entire VC industry is somewhat discredited, Mr Khosla’s reputation remains unscathed and his companies continue to outperform others in their sectors. At the moment, a combination if luck and persistence have made Mr. Khosla perhaps the best VC on the planet. Passage
From India In the first act, the protagonist begins his early journey towards success and quickly achieves some early recognition. Vinod Khosla left for US in 1976 at the age of 21. He founded Daisy Systems and then Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Bill Joy, Scott McNealy and Andreas Becholsheim. In the second Act he struggles and retreats, when the Sun board pushed him out in 1984. Mr. Khosla’s first years away from Sun were anything but happy. In 1992 he moved his family back to Pune, India. Says Mr Khosla “I wanted my kids to know their parents, grand-parents, cousins and their children, and the culture” In Act 3, he rises again like a phoenix and enjoys fame and fortune. Khosla, who had invested early in technology companies such as Internet-router maker Juniper Networks (his $3 million investment is worth over $2 billion), Cerent Corp. (bought by Cisco Systems Inc. for $8 billion); Excite, (later acquired by At Home Corp. for $6.7 billion); Siara Systems (acquired by Redback Networks for $4.3 billion), became Silicon Valley's most celebrated venture investor. Indian-born Khosla, 46, has the numbers to show he is at the top of his game - some forty technology companies he helped shape are estimated to have created a total of $150 billion in market value. Red Herring magazine estimates that Khosla's investments have created six jobs for every day he has lived in the United States. Little surprise then that when Khosla talks, Silicon Valley investors and analysts listen. Vinod Khosla, on Wednesday told a spillover crowd of some 600 at the Robertson Stephens technology conference that he saw investors pile into "markets they don't really understand" during the good times last year and he warned that history could repeat itself. Khosla has taken early stakes in some of the most successful networking companies, said U.S. venture capital continues to be marked by too much hot money chasing bad business plans. One important flashpoint could be optical networking - still a hot sector for venture investments, but one that could be undone if visions of an all-optical telecommunications network turn out to be "an optical illusion," said Khosla, a partner with heavyweight venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Khosla said broadband technology remains key to making corporations operate in what he called "real time," although adoption of high-speed access remains slow. "There's a lack of discrimination," he said. "There's a need for rationality." Khosla's long-term message is upbeat: Expect corporate America to routinely invest 10 percent of its revenues from sales in information technology in coming years, up from about one percent now. "There's a relentless trend toward the increasing influence of technology on business," Khosla said. He also predicted intense change in the way that people use technology in everyday life over the next decade, stressing the next 10 years will "see more delta than we've seen in the last thirty." "Technology used to be a tool for business strategy," Khosla added. "In the past five years, technology has become a driver of business strategy." "We have a major disconnect in the last 500 yards," Khosla said, noting the slow pace of wiring buildings for high-speed Internet access. As for the appearance of venture "incubators" in recent years, Khosla said that was a warning sign that too much hot money was funding too many bad business models. An incubator title has nothing to do with deep pockets, he said, adding that rather "it's a right you earn because you've gone through the painful process of building companies." Despite the criticism Khosla had for his own industry, he predicted it will help set a major milestone within five years, when some venture-backed firm manages to be the first $1 trillion corporation in market capitalization. By comparison, General Electric Company, currently tops in that category, was worth $458 billion as of the close of business on Wednesday. Britain
honors sitar player Ravi Shankar LONDON, England - Renowned sitar player Ravi Shankar on has been named an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), a distinction recognizing his efforts to bring Indian music to Western audiences. "I am delighted Ravi Shankar has been given this honor," said Chris Smith, Great Britain's culture secretary, who welcomed Shankar Wednesday. "He has also introduced post-war generations throughout the West to the complexity and beauty of sitar music." British High Commissioner Sir Rob Young named Shankar a CBE last week in New Delhi, India. The musician is in his 80s. "No one has done more than Ravi Shankar to promote the understanding and love of Indian classical music in the West, and in particular in Britain," said Young. "This is a most fitting way of honoring an outstanding musician who is deeply respected in my country and indeed all over the world." Questions
of Allegiance (THE GLASS PALACE - A Novel By Amitav Ghosh) What an exciting time for Indian writing in English. Every month, it seems, another young Indian writer publishes a novel capturing the migratory pangs of the new Indian diaspora, an immigrant group that now ranges from dot-com engineers in Silicon Valley to taxi drivers in New York. In "The Glass Palace," Amitav Ghosh has staked a different claim: turning the clock backward to examine a lesser-known, earlier Indian diaspora, and in doing so exploring the foundation of modern Indian identity. Ambitious, multigenerational, "The Glass Palace" is a saga akin to a 19th-century Russian novel. Opening with the British invasion of Burma in 1885, its early chapters focus on an Indian - Rajkumar, a penniless boy who, through sheer intelligence and pluck, becomes a rich merchant in Burma and marries Dolly, a lady-in-waiting from the exiled Burmese royal court. From Rajkumar, the novel expands to a vast array of characters in Burma, India and Malaya, all connected through the broader currents of history and the intimate links of friendship and marriage. Out of this large cast, the two most searing portraits are of Rajkumar, the unquestioning empire builder, and Arjun, the tormented warrior who tries desperately to break free of the British empire that has molded him. "The Glass Palace" is saturated with questions of agency and volition. The danger in such a novel is that the fiction can become schematic, as characters fulfill a particular facet of history and the balance tilts toward fact and overwhelms the imaginary terrain. Some of the portrayals in "The Glass Palace" seem to be willed, workmanlike representations: Uma, for instance, the sheltered wife of Rajkumar, has an abrupt transformation after the disgrace of her bureaucrat husband and reinvents herself as a leader in the independence movement. Characters often pause to deliver articulate disquisitions on their place in history and politics. There is something irresistible about the novel's ambition and how thoroughly it dissects the impact of the British colonial enterprise. "The Glass Palace," like its far-ranging subject, is capacious; it reflects the author's own curiosity and hunger for understanding. "The Glass Palace's" most profound point: that human beings are molded in large part by forces beyond their control. The result is a rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland--a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.
Good things, it is said, often come in small packages. So do surprises. And WUSA's evening anchor Gurvir Dhindsa is a tiny package of surprises. She's an immigrant who has achieved success in one of the most high-profile of careers, television news. She's a wife trying to balance her life in the nation's capital with her commuter marriage. She's also changing the face of Washington television, adding a presence that underscores the diverse ethnicity of this market. Gurvir Dhindsa, born in Chandigarh, in India's Punjab, moved to the United States with her parents when she was 7 and her sisters 5 and 3. There may have been some cultural shock when they arrived in Portland, Ore., but the family never faced the language problem that some new residents do. "I don't remember learning to speak English," she said. "In India, English is the secondary language from the time you're small." David Roberts, WUSA’s news director says "Gurvir is one of the smartest and most committed journalists I have ever worked with," he said. "She exemplifies what is required for today's anchor talent, which is being an outstanding reporter first. . . . All our primary anchor talent understand that this is not a 9-to-5 job, this is a 24/7 operation." Still, family is so important to her that even though she has an aunt and uncle nearby in Rockville, she is likely to add to the 100,000-plus miles on her GMC Yukon and drive to Mississippi to see her husband or to Tennessee to see her sisters - Gurjeet, a teacher; Tina, a doctor with three children -- or her parents, Harbans and Dev. After college, Dhindsa began work at Nashville's CBS affiliate, WTVF. It was a behind-the-scenes job, she said: "I just wanted a chance. I was just thankful I had a job at a TV station." She harbored ambitions of becoming a reporter and anchor, but having grown up sheltered in an Indian family, she said, "I was very shy. People think that when you're in this business, you're automatically gregarious and outgoing. But that isn't so." In 1988, she joined WLOX in Biloxi, Miss., an ABC affiliate, where she was a reporter and weekend anchor, moving to weekday anchor. She also had her hair cropped in the style she now wears. Over 14 years in Mississippi she won state awards for anchoring and field reporting and captured the top prize from the Mississippi Associated Press several years in a row. Then it was on to Atlanta for three years, anchoring "Good Day Atlanta." The first hour was news, the second two hours interviews, and she became Atlanta's Katie Couric, a bit of a celebrity. But Washington offers special opportunities for a television journalist. She co-anchored WUSA's coverage of the Bush inaugural and reported from the Texas Black-Tie and Boots Ball, glamour assignments that are now just part of the job for one of the few Indian women on U.S. television. "When I was getting ready to leave Atlanta, I found a paper I had written for my ninth-grade English class," said Dhindsa. " I thought he was the neatest teacher in the world. I was so insecure, unhappy, the oldest child of immigrant parents. I didn't quite understand what was going on in my life. He wrote little notes on this paper and told me, 'You're going to be fine.' "So I found him -- he's still teaching English at a high school in Nashville -- and I wrote him a letter. He was a big influence in my life and I wanted him to know. I said, 'Can you believe this is the same little insecure girl? And I'm doing okay.' " Putting
the Explorer under the Microscope - Ford is going all-out to ensure
the revamped SUV is glitch-free Dearborn, Michigan - America's best-selling sport-utility vehicle, the Ford Explorer, went into a skid last fall as a federal investigation of faulty Firestone tires prompted even more troubling questions about whether the Explorer itself was unsafe. Although Ford Motor Co. vigorously defended the SUV's safety record, sales dropped 18% in the fourth quarter. Yet as the bad publicity swirled, Ford dealers could take heart knowing that a much-improved Explorer was soon to be launched. The new model--the first complete overhaul since the Explorer's debut in 1990--would be far more stable and offer a host of new safety features, including rollover protection. It's an expensive way to run a company. The defects and resulting production delays cost Ford a bundle in lost profits over the past year. ''Pick a number. It's over $1 billion,'' Nasser told the analysts. But Ford executives say the cost of fixing warranty claims later would be far higher. And in the case of the Explorer, Ford says, risks of having glitches pop up in customers' driveways are untenable. ''Clearly, we are under the microscope because of the Firestone issue,'' says Gurminder S. Bedi, Ford's vice-president for North American truck operations. ''Our integrity's on the line.'' The auto maker found plenty of problems. Most were only irritants, like rust on a tow-hitch. But other problems had the potential to lead to big-time safety recalls, such as an internal steering-column switch that would have enabled motorists to start the engine in the ''drive'' position. Tracking down the root cause gets tricky since many components are now put together by suppliers at their own facilities from parts made by many smaller vendors. In the case of the steering-column switch, the problem was traced to a supplier using too much solder on a $1 circuit board. ''When you get to the bottom of it, they are that trivial,'' says Bedi of such glitches. ''But when you let them escape, they're just huge.'' And hugely embarrassing for a company trying to rebuild its reputation. |
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