Here are some pictures from the Friends of K9 event on Monday, June 21st at the Computer History Museum. Thanks to everyone for coming and making it a very special and memorable launch for K9 Ventures.
A very special thanks to Ron Yeh for volunteering the role of ‘K9 Photographer’ for the event. Really appreciate Ron’s effort in helping to capture the event for posterity.
Here are the slides from a talk I gave at a Carnegie Mellon Alumni event in the Bay Area today. #20tweets is tweet-sized advice for founders of tech startups. In the presentation I went into more detail and provided some rationale/anecdotes behind these tweets. For now, here are just the tweets:
Update as of 07/10/2010: The video recording of this event was done using a ceiling mounted camera; so the video quality is not great and the slides are not very visible, but you can still hear reasonably well. The talk was a two part talk. In the first part I talk about my experience as an entrepreneur — a journey spanning 6 years, 5 different companies, 4 M&A deals, 3 financing rounds, 2 licensing deals, and 1 serial entrepreneur. This part of the talk just used a map as a guide to keep people on track. So here is the unedited version of the video recording from this event — it is somewhat long, but hopefully at least some of you will find it enjoyable/useful.
A Tale of Two Startups and #20tweets from K9 Ventures on Vimeo.
I’m pleased to announce the formation of K9 Ventures, L.P. – a seed-stage fund.
K9 Ventures, L.P. is a $6.25M fund that is designed to do concept and seed-stage investments in technology companies. The fund will be deployed over a period of 3-4 years, with initial investment in the range of $100K – $250K, while reserving capital to participate in the follow-on round. K9 expects to be an active investor in portfolio companies and will typically make only 4-6 new investments per year.
The fund focuses on investing in companies that meet the following necessary but not sufficient criteria:
The first closing for the fund was held in Q2 2009. K9 began investing in 2009 and is honored to have the following five companies in its portfolio:
K9 Ventures sits in between individual angels and institutional venture capital funds. The fund target was $6M and I’m pleased to meet (and slightly exceed) that target. You may call it a micro-cap VC fund or a super-angel fund. (Personally, I prefer just saying a seed stage fund, but as some folks have pointed out a super-angel sounds a lot better than a micro-VC! 
) The objective is to provide entrepreneurs with a meaningful amount of capital and support to help the company build a sustainably profitable business.
I would like to take a moment to thank K9′s Limited Partners for their support of this first fund. Most of all I would like to thank the entrepreneurs who have allowed K9 to be part of their companies and their personal entrepreneurial journeys. In a lot of ways I see K9 as my next startup — except it’s a meta-level startup.
P.S.: The K9 Ventures website will be revamped to provide more details soon. In the interim, please follow @k9ventures and @manukumar for updates and direct any questions to manu@k9ventures.com.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry) recently authored an article that ran on Business Insider. The article was sensationally titled ‘The Startup Visa Act Must Be Stopped‘ and in it Pascal describes his reservations about the Startup Visa proposal. I don’t know Pascal, but I do hope that he, and others, will read and consider this response to his article.
One of the main concerns Pascal raises is that the Startup Visa would depend too much on investors. Well, let’s see. If you have a million dollars to spare, then you could apply for the EB-5 visa and come to the US on that basis. However, most startup entrepreneurs I’ve met, don’t have that kind of money laying around to invest personally. The Startup Visa proposes that instead of the funding coming from the entrepreneur himself/herself, that funding can come from US-based superangels and/or VCs. One of the big concerns of the US immigration system is that they don’t want foreigners to come to the US without having the means to support themselves (and thereby become a burden on the State). This is true of almost all visa categories — even to come as a tourist you need to either show that you have sufficient funds for the duration of your stay, or, that you have a US-based financial sponsor. The same applies for a student visa. For a work (H-1B) visa, the company needs to demonstrate that it has the financial means to pay the prevailing wage. So by changing who funds a company to superangels or VCs, rather than the foreign entrepreneur, we’re trying to actually make it possible for more entrepreneurs to come to the US. There has to be some source of funding/support — superangels and VCs are the logical sources for that. This is *not* some underhanded play at having more leverage over entrepreneurs.
Most entrepreneurs (myself included at one point) over-estimate the issues of “control” in a company. Investors do *not* want to run your company. They simply want *you* to run it well. If they wanted to run a company — they could go start their own (especially for those of us who have been entrepreneurs already). If you don’t want to raise money from investors, and choose to do it organically, or by using personal resources, that’s great and there is nothing in the Startup Visa stopping you from doing that. Having funding tied to the Startup Visa makes it possible for the fledgling startup to indeed be able to create jobs and hire people in the US.
Pascal argues that the Startup Visa increases, rather than decreases the risk for entrepreneurs. I don’t see how this is the case. I came to the US on a student visa, and decided to stay to start a company (for the full story, see my previous post on My Story and Support for the Founders Visa). I had nine months of practical training left to get the company going. If it succeeded, I still needed to cross the hurdle of getting a visa. In the case of the Startup Visa you get two years to start, with extensions thereafter. If you fail, there is nothing preventing you from getting a new Startup Visa — provided you can find sources for funding for your next idea. Or, if you want to get a job you can apply for a visa for that too. The Startup Visa doesn’t change the risks for an entrepreneur. I chose to start my company in the US because I felt that it was the right place to do it — it was my choice. Having made that choice, the Startup Visa makes it easier for an entrepreneur like me to come to the US, or to stay in the US, as the case may be.
Showing steady progress across one or more measures (making revenue, creating jobs, securing additional funding) are all parts of the Startup Visa proposal. That’s how it should be in any meritocracy. When I entered the PhD program at Stanford, we were told that one of the conditions for us to remain in the program is to demonstrate Reasonable Progress (see Section II, Guidelines for Reasonable Progress), otherwise you don’t get to stay.
Finally, Pascal argues that the Startup Visa will be bad for investors as entrepreneurs will self-select to start companies in their own countries, or, wait till they have a million dollars to put down for an EB-5. Well, this is how it is right now. There is no easy way for a foreign entrepreneur (who doesn’t have a million dollars) to come to the US under the current system. If anything, the Startup Visa makes this easier, not harder. So I fail to see how this would be bad for the US, or bad for US investors (and yes, we are focusing on the US here).
Among a bunch of other smaller points Pascal mentions that the Startup Visa doesn’t give you a greencard right away. Yes, that too is exactly how it should be. When my wife and I got married, she didn’t get a permanent greencard right away. She got a conditional greencard — and the condition needs to be removed after two years. These are safeguards that the system needs to prevent the system from being gamed (granted it’s not always foolproof). In the case of marriage, it is to ensure that it’s not a sham marriage. In the case of the Startup Visa it is to be able to verify that it is indeed a bonafide startup that contributes positively to the US economy.
He also points out that the Startup Visa doesn’t increase the total number of visas, but shares the quota from the EB-5 visa. That’s because the EB-5 visa is severely under-utilized (Annual quota: 10,000, 2008: 1,443. 2009: 4,218 – tripled after creation of ‘regional centers’). There aren’t a lot of startup entrepreneurs who can afford to invest a million dollars from their personal net worth (the investment cannot be from a third party and the EB-5 process requires proof of this in the form of documentation for lawful source of funds). By repurposing an unused portion of the EB-5 visa category, the Startup Visa will allow more entrepreneurs to come to the US, without having to increase the overall allocation for visas.
I am an immigrant founder and I have contributed to the creation of over 100 jobs in the US based on my own startups, and startups I have invested in. In the past few years I have invested in two companies that have had immigrant founders — in both cases the founders had PhDs from Stanford and were able to make the case for an EB-1 (Alien of Extra-ordinary Ability) and an EB-2 (National Interest) visa. At the same time, I’ve met numerous would-be startups where the founders don’t have advanced degrees. They are stuck working at companies in the US, biding their time till they can eventually get their greencard and then be able to start their own companies. These are highly qualified people — they would be able to raise money for their companies, but they still cannot venture out on their own because of visa issues. The Startup Visa addresses this.
Pascal goes on to make some good suggestions about other reforms in the US immigration policy. Personally, I’m in favor of these changes. But, I am also a realist. Immigration is a very hot-button topic in the US. Any changes to the overall system will be part of the comprehensive immigration reform package, but we have no idea when that might happen. The Startup Visa Act is a highly focused and pointed bill that aims to attract talented entrepreneurs to the US to build their companies here, create jobs here, and to contribute to the US economy — at a time when we need it most.
(The opinions in this post are solely of the author @manukumar and all the usual legal disclaimers apply)
On Saturday, October 24th, Stanford University hosted the Stanford Roundtable. The renowned interviewer Charlie Rose moderated a discussion titled: ‘The Road Back: From Economic Meltdown to Renewal’. The archived webcast video is available on iTunes and on YouTube.
At one point in the discussion Charlie Rose asked about the education system. President Hennessey remarked that: “We depend at the graduate level on importing lots of graduate students because we don’t do enough out of our K-12 system. Because if it’s broken somewhere it’s broken deeply in science and math education.”
The following conversation is simply brilliant and is a showcase for how silly and frustrating the US immigration policy really is — even to those who have a direct audience with the President of the United States. Here are some of the best quotes from the video:
Eric Schmidt: “We don’t give them visa guys! This is a brilliant strategy; bring the smartest people in the world to Stanford, educate them and kick them out of the country. Brilliant strategy, great for America!”
Charlie Rose: “We should staple a greencard to a diploma”
Eric Schmidt: “Don’t you think a Stanford Graduate education is a reasonable condition for actually becoming a US Citizen?”
Eric Schmidt: “It is the stupidest policy in all of government; take the smartest people who are going to build companies and pay taxes and have them do it in another country.”
John Hennessey: “It makes no sense to take somebody who came here at two or three, with their parents, and say ‘you got a Harvard education, now go back to where you came from’”
The above quotes don’t really come through with their full intensity until you watch the video below. Watch from 0:24:41 till 0:27:45.
I have written before about my story as an immigrant founder. I am constantly meeting brilliant people who have come to the US for their education, studied here, and either have to return to their home country, or, are stuck working with their big-company employers simply because of their visa/immigration status. Perhaps the US should really consider taking the top 10% of all foreign students who earn their bachelors from a top 50 US school and give them greencard. Lets make that top 25% of all foreign students who earn a Master’s degree and 100% of all foreign students who earn a PhD. (I’ve tweeted this before, but Twitter search is so broken I can’t find my own tweet.)
Smart people come from all over the world. The US is lucky that they want to come here. It is foolish to not do everything to keep them here.
In the past few days there has been a lot of discussion on the topic of a Founders Visa. The credit for starting this fire goes to Paul Graham from Y Combinator, who wrote a great essay titled The Founders Visa in April 2009. Brad Feld (Brad is an advisor to K9) from the Foundry Group was instrumental in keeping the flame alive by posting about it on his blog (The Founders Visa Movement) in September. More recently, Eric Ries and Dave McClure added fuel to the fire (See Eric Ries’ blog post: Support the Startup Founders Visa with a tweet) and helped kick off a campaign on @2Gov. As an immigrant founder, this is a topic that I can relate to and care about. This was one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome when I was starting up, and if I hadn’t been fortunate to find ways around it, my story would have been very different. I figured I would share some of the background of this story here, as it may help make a case for the Founders Visa movement.
I came to the United States in 1992 at the age of 17 (so there, now you know exactly how old I am!) to attend Carnegie Mellon University. My interaction with what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service started earlier that year to get an F-1 (Student) Visa for my undergraduate studies. Fortunately, my application for the F-1 visa was very smooth, and I was granted a 5-year visa to study at Carnegie Mellon. I completed my Bachelors in 3 years (another story for another time) and so was able to go directly into a professional Masters program (also at Carnegie Mellon) and complete a masters degree without having to apply for a new visa. During that time, I did one three month long internship — actually it was closer to 2 months, but it used up three months of my 12 month F-1 OPT window.
In December 1996, while I was still a student in the Master of Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon, I got bit hard by the entrepreneurial bug. I always knew that I would someday start my own company. It was only a question of when, where, and how. I decided that I was going to do it right then. The first step to figuring out whether this was even possible was to determine if I could start a company while I was on a student visa. After some research, including speaking with lawyers who were kind enough to answer my questions, the conclusion was that any person, whether a US citizen or not, whether in the US or not, can own assets in the US. What that meant was that I could start a company, own the company, but under the terms of the F-1 visa, I couldn’t work for the company (i.e. couldn’t draw a salary). The latter was fine by me since there was no money in the company for me to draw a salary any way. I formed SneakerLabs, Inc. in December 1996, while on a student visa.
I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1997 and decided to use my OPT to give the company a proper shot. I knew that in the worst case scenario, if things didn’t work out, I could always fall back to the traditional route of looking for a job. So this was a great time to take a chance on myself and see what I could do. The F-1 optional practical training (OPT) is one of the best things about the student visa program as it affords the flexibility to work for any company, provided it is in your field.
I was bootstrapping the company and started with $5,000 that I had saved up from a prior summer internship. I spent $2,500 on the first computer and let’s just say that there were lots of tomato sandwiches consumed for a while 
(I guess the tomato sandwiches were my healthier version of PG‘s Ramen noodles.) To bring in some money into the company, I started consulting through the company (to pay the company bills) and teaching at Carnegie Mellon as a lecturer (to keep the tomato sandwiches going!). At the same time, I was also working on the product. I hired my TA as my first employee and paid him $12.50 an hour to come to my apartment and hack code with me in my living room, which I converted into an office.
Towards the end of my OPT (mid 1998) is when the H1-B visa cap issue hit. The US issues 65,000 H1-B work visas every year. And it so happened that that year, all of the 65,000 visas had been issued and there would be no more visas available till October of that year. I was within weeks/months of being “out of status.” The options were to either go back home to New Delhi, India, or, risk getting myself into an immigration nightmare. Fortunately, I had advisors who helped me come up with creative solutions. They suggested I go back to being a student. I applied to a PhD program at Carnegie Mellon so that I could return to a F-1 (Student) visa while I was waiting for the next round of the H1-B visa quota. Fortunately, I was accepted into the program and that allowed me to legally stay in the United States. I took myself off the payroll of the company and went back to being a student.
When it came time to apply for an H1-B there was a genuine concern that my fledgling company may not be able to show that it had the financial resources to pay the prevailing wage for me. This meant that I had to either show enough revenue, or find investors who would be willing to put money into the company. There were a sum total of three or four “venture capital” funds in Pittsburgh at the time, and none of them had done much with this new fangled thing called the Internet. Besides I was a young, first-time entrepreneur at the age of 23. Raising money in Pittsburgh was not going to be easy.
In my attempt to build credibility and recruit people for my little company, I had started the Pittsburgh Java Users Group (the PittJUG today has close to 500 members!). By a stroke of luck, I met a visiting professor at one of the PittJUG meetings who offered to introduce me to his friends who were looking at investing in startups. I engaged in conversations with these angels investors and they provided a letter that I could use in support of my H1-B application. Some of you may have already caught on to this by now, but it is rather unusual for someone to start a company and then have an H1-B sponsored through that same company. My second employee signed the H1-B petition on behalf of the company so that I could be hired by my own company!
In the meanwhile, I had also been teaching more at Carnegie Mellon. The Director of my Masters program, the late Dr. James Tomayko, agreed to hire me on full-time at CMU and file for a second H1-B visa through Carnegie Mellon. This was great as it provided me with a backup option in case the petition through my own company was rejected.
In October 1998, I was excited beyond belief when I received an approval notice for an H1-B visa through my own company! I could now legally stay in the US and work for my own company. This also eliminated the big risk for my potential investors that I wouldn’t be able to stay in the country, and so I was able to close the financing round for the company in November 1998. I was elated to have overcome one of the biggest hurdles of my entrepreneurial career and ready to build my company.
In a startup cash is king. Under the terms of my H1-B visa, the company was required to pay me a prevailing wage of $60,000. However, I didn’t need that much to survive. I would much rather leave more money in the company and have a longer run way ahead of us. The workaround was that the company would pay me at the prevailing wage rate of $60,000 per annum, but then I would take a part of what I received in-hand, and loan it back to the company. The loan would be senior debt on the company’s books. If the company failed, I would lose it all. If it succeeded, I would get paid back. Fortunately, things worked out and the repayment of my loan to the company is what allowed me to buy my first new car.
I should emphasize that there were multiple points at which I came very close to having to leave the United States because of the visa issues. Though in the end it all worked out and the above story reads like it was all smooth, I can tell you that it wasn’t. I couldn’t go out and raise money for the company when I started because the risk of my having to leave the US hung over my head as the sword of damocles.
My journey with the INS by my side continued as my companies grew and became successful. Over the years, I held multiple H1-B visas (for SneakerLabs, Carnegie Mellon, Octane/E.piphany and iMeet). Every corporate transition we went through meant that I had to re-file for my visa under the new company.
After the success of SneakerLabs, I wanted to try and get legal permanent resident status, so that I could end the immigration hassles once and for all. My immigration attorney (Robert S. Whitehill, now a partner at Fox Rothschild) suggested that we shouldn’t use the typical path to a greencard under the EB-3 (Skilled worker/professional) category. The EB-3 greencard could take up to 5-6 years to be approved since it required labor certification. For anyone coming from India (like me) or China, this mean a protracted waiting period. Instead, we opted to go for the EB-1 (Alien of Extraordinary Ability) category. While it would take several months for me to assemble the dossier in support of an EB-1 application, there was no waiting period for EB-1s (no labor certification required) and it could be a faster path to getting a greencard. Bob’s advice was fortuitous since the EB-3 is also employer-sponsored and so if you change companies (which I of course did) the application would have to be refiled and would lose its position in the queue. The EB-1 on the other hand is self-sponsored and not tied to any company, which turned out to be the right choice for me.
I got my greencard approval in 2001, a few months after 9/11. By this point, I had already sold my first company and founded two additional companies. My first company employed about 20 US citizens (I was the only “alien”). My second company at its peak employed about 80 people — also almost all US citizens.
Technology leadership and innovation knows no bounds. There are smart people all over the world. What has worked for the United States for so long is that these people gravitate towards the United States. Some, like me, come to the United States for their higher education and advanced degrees. The definition of entrepreneurship is ‘insane perseverance in the face of complete resistance.’ Therefore, I fundamentally believe that true entrepreneurs will find a way regardless of how difficult or complex the system may be. I’ve used my own experience as a prototype to help the founders of two of my portfolio companies obtain their legal permanent resident status by going through the EB-1 (Alien of Extraordinary Ability) and EB-2 (National Interest) process respectively. However, in both cases, these founders had advanced degrees (PhDs) from Stanford, and were already amazingly accomplished in their field. Therefore, they could make the case for their legal permanent residency under these categories. That doesn’t however account for the thousands of other highly qualified individuals who would otherwise make for brilliant entrepreneurs.
I have chatted first hand with founders of companies that are from Singapore, Ireland, India and various other countries who have to contend with visa issues. These visa issues often become one of the significant hurdles to pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams here in the United States. I am now a bonafide citizen of the United States and as a US citizen, I feel strongly that the best thing the United States can do is to attract and retain the smartest people from all over the world. Having a Founders Visa would not only encourage the formation of new ventures that would create jobs and prosperity in the United States, but would be one more way for the US to attract and retain top talent from all over the world. PG, Brad and others have already addressed how the vetting and qualification process can work to ensure that the right people are allowed into the US. Modifying the criteria for the EB-5 visa category such that the investment dollars can come from US-based venture capital firms seems to be the most efficient way to make a Founders Visa happen.
I’d encourage you to participate in the Founders Visa Movement by voicing your opinion on your blog, in the comments below and most of all by sending a tweet for the cause at @2gov.
Update: There is now a new website for the Founders Visa at http://www.startupvisa.com — please visit and chime in. Also, I’d be happy to continue the discussion on twitter — I can be reached at @manukumar.
Update 09/27/2009: Slightly updated the post to explain why the choice of an EB-1 over and EB-2/EB-3 (protracted waiting period for labor certification since I am originally from India).
Update 03/12/2010: Vivek Wadhwa pointed out that the Startup Visa is something the Kauffman Foundation has been looking into for a while, possibly pre-dating PG’s blog post. Kudos to the Kauffman Foundation for doing so and kudos to PG for bringing it to the foreground with his blog post.
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Yesterday, while attending TechCrunch50, I tweeted some tips for the companies presenting at the conference and those participating in the demo pit. By popular demand, I’m aggregating these tweets in a blog post:
Ever since I found the blog Startup Company Lawyer, I’ve had a high regard for its author, Yokum Taku, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Yokum’s posts are always chock-full-of-good-information. His most recent post was on the topic of When do I need to incorporate a company?
I’ve spent some time thinking about this before, and, in fact, had a couple of tweets related to this as well:
Yokum already did an excellent job of laying down the legal considerations. As an extension to my tweets above, I wanted to expand upon some of the reasons behind these tweets. Here is the text of the comment I posted on Yokum’s blog in response to his post. I suggest you read his post first and then read my comment below:
Yokum, thanks for another great post! EAU (Excellent as Usual) as one of my favorite customers used to say!
You provided a great overview of the reasons to incorporate from a legal point of view, I wanted to chime in with some more subtle, but hopefully useful comments:
I maintain that the best time to incorporate is ‘yesterday’ — or as soon as you are 100% sure that you want to give this idea/company a real shot. To me incorporation is a ‘show of commitment’. It sets a date and time in stone for the inception of the company, and, it starts the clock running. This has several advantages:
1) If you are going to be bringing on co-founders or employees, the fact that the company has already been incorporated, and is official, can have an impact on how the equity split gets portioned out.
2) Incorporating starts the clock on the corporate history — which can often be useful when dealing with customers. For example, when asked, ‘How long have you been in business?’ you can confidently point to your date of incorporation as the ‘start of business.’
3) The same also applies when having valuation discussions with VCs. If the company hasn’t even been incorporated yet, then they are likely to try and push you more on valuation. I’m sure several folks will disagree with this, but I am confident this happens — even if it happens subconsciously.
4) Likewise, the date of incorporation often plays a role in what portion of the founders’ stock is already vested at the time of a venture financing.
5) Incorporating forces you to start maintaining the books (or so I hope!) and also forces you to learn all the administrative details it takes to run a company. While this isn’t something that directly adds value to the company, it is something that needs to be done. The sooner you learn this, the better it is. Doing this from the beginning and keeping things clean will be something you appreciate when you get into due diligence.
There are of course some disadvantages to incorporating as well:
1) Cost — even though most law firms will defer some of the legal costs involved, incorporating through a law firm is still an expensive process (deferring is not the same as not charging!)
2) Administrative overhead — once you incorporate, you are expected to comply with federal and state regulations. So you have to file taxes for the entity every year (Federal Taxes, DE Franchise Tax, California Tax ($800 minimum if I remember right)).
Tip: If you are thinking of incorporating and it’s close to November/December already — WAIT till January! That way you don’t have to file all this paperwork for just a month or two of existence! And you’ll have a full year ahead of you to find an accountant/tax person to help for tax time.
But all in all, I say, incorporate as soon as you are sure you want to give this a real shot. Stop hedging, and just do it!
It was 2:00 AM and I was still sitting in ‘The Cave’ — the name we affectionately gave to the cubicles in the bowels of Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon. It was called ‘The Cave’ because it’s all under ground, with no natural light portals whatsoever. The cave was kinda like Vegas — once you enter you lose track of time. Day or night it looked the same, and smelled the same (and not too pleasant at times!).
I was in the cave late that night because I was firefighting. A couple of weekends ago, on a whim to teach myself Java I had written up software for hosting chat rooms. The server was the decrepit little Pentium 200 sitting under my desk. The problem was that the server was crashing under the load of all the people using it. I could just go home and sleep, but the problem was that if the server crashed, I would end up with a ton of email the next day from the disgruntled users. In hindsight, I should have used Moore’s Law to solve the scalability issue. But I was a student and buying machines in 1996 was still expensive.
I was chatting with one of the frequent and loyal users of my site that night and explaining to him how I didn’t have enough resources to keep up with the growth of the service. Running thousands of concurrent users was pushing the limits of what the Java VM could handle on the P200. That’s when he suggested, maybe I should start a company — and start charging for the chat rooms. The bit flipped — I went from being a hacker, to being an entrepreneur.
There is nothing like your users telling you to charge for your service, because they want it and need it. At the time when I started my first company, I had one of the few Java-based chat solutions available, and was one of the first to offer what are now known as embed tags so that people could create their own rooms. SneakerChat, as I called it, had over 20,000 concurrent users with well over 50,000 registered users (registration was optional).
Starting my own company sounded cool. I knew it was something I wanted to do eventually anyway. It’s what I had always considered doing, right from the time that I was building and selling musical doorbells to my parents friends. (That’s a whole other story for another time). But, I knew nothing about starting a company and I knew even less about what it meant to start a company in the United States. I hadn’t grown up here, I was only here as a student and that too on a student visa. And I didn’t have any extra money I could use as capital to start a company with — but when did that ever stop anyone!
I decided I needed to learn about what it meant to start and run a company. Some of my classmates had taken a course on entrepreneurship at the business school across campus. I asked them which class it was and who the professor was. They recommended taking the class appropriately called ‘Entrepreneurship I’ taught by Professor John R. (‘Jack’) Thorne, who was the Director of the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the business school. In the next couple of days, I walked over to the business school and into the Don Jones Entrepreneurship Center. Jack’s assistant (whose name eludes me right now, but I think it was Suzanne) was great at calming my nerves as I was probably visibly nervous when I walked into my first meeting with Jack.
I told Jack that I wanted to take his class on entrepreneurship. Jack suggested that I take a different class — Technology-based Entrepreneurship, which was offered the following semester. He explained to me that his class was only for students of the business school and on top of that, it was already over-subscribed with a long waiting list. I was somewhat disheartened, but didn’t know what else I could say or do. Though I was despondent, I decided to at least show up for the first lecture for Jack’s class to see what it was like. Later that week, I snuck into Jack’s class and found myself a corner I could stand in without being noticed much. I was at least 5-10 years younger than everyone else in the class, I wasn’t from the business school, and didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.
The first slide Jack put up that day was his definition of entrepreneurship: ‘Insane Perseverance in the Face of Complete Resistance.’ That was it! I was hooked. It took a couple of seconds for it to all come together, but then it just clicked. Jack had just given me the perfect way to get into his class. It was the first test on the way to becoming an entrepreneur. I decided right there, on the first slide of his first lecture, that the only way I could be successful as an entrepreneur was to first convince Jack Thorne that I should take his class!
I scheduled a followup meeting with Jack and in his office. I told Jack that he had already given me what I needed to take his class: Insane Perseverance. I told him that I was not going away. That I would keep showing up to his class and hiding in the back listening in. I wouldn’t ask any questions or say anything so as not to disrupt the class, but I was going to be there for every lecture, and the only way Jack could get rid of me would be to have me thrown out!
Needless to say, Jack relented and he welcomed me into his class. I got to take his class when several other people on the waiting list didn’t. I took every single class Jack Thorne taught at the business school. Entrepreneurship I. Entrepreneurship II. Entrepreneurship Project. Entrepreneurial Management. If it had the word entrepreneur in it, I was there. I wrote the business plan for my company as a class project for Jack’s class. I incorporated my first company, SneakerLabs, Inc., while I was still a student in Jack’s class. I was 20.
Jack Thorne
Jack Thorne passed away last year. He was one of my mentors, without whom, I would have never gotten one of the most important lessons of my entrepreneurial life — Insane Perseverance in the Face of Complete Resistance. Those words were at times the only things to fall back on when things got tough. And while there are lots of other experiences and stories that got me there, that first day in Jack Thorne’s class is the day I started my journey as an entrepreneur — one with Insane Perseverance.
Thanks to my wife and Ron Yeh (@ronyeh) for proofreading the above post.
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Rajeev Motwani
I was in complete disbelief when I read the first tweet yesterday evening that Stanford Computer Science professor Rajeev Motwani had passed away. I was still incredulous and hoping that it was untrue until the sad news was verified in a email sent to the department. Even now as I write this with Rajeev’s picture on my screen, it’s still hard to believe.
In March of this year Rajeev agreed to be an advisor to K9 Ventures. I was very excited to have Rajeev on board as an advisor for K9 and as a personal mentor. His untimely passing is a shock that will reverberate through Stanford and the Valley.
My introduction to Rajeev began as a student in the PhD program at Stanford CS. Rajeev was the head of the PhD program when I joined, and he was the defacto advisor to all incoming students until they found their own advisor. He was responsible for making sure that every student find a new home within the department in a timely manner. I can still remember Rajeev’s advice to all the students — that your only job in the first quarter is to find an advisor. And to not worry about requirements like Comprehensive Exams and Qualifying Exams and focus on the research. His mandate to us was that a PhD should make an incremental contribution to human knowledge. That phrase stuck in the back of my head throughout my PhD work and proved to be a good filter to test potential thesis topics.
Even Rajeev didn’t know that in my first few interactions with him, I felt quite intimidated. Intimidated because of the immense respect I had for his intellect, his ability and his judgment. Even though my research interest was in the field of Human Computer Interaction, since my advisor (Terry Winograd) was on sabbatical at Google for the first year that I was at Stanford, I was fortunate to interact with Rajeev a little while longer than I otherwise would have.
When I decided that I wanted to enter the field of Venture Capital, Rajeev was one of the first people I contacted. He was instrumental in opening several doors for me and made valuable introductions to other VCs and firms on Sand Hill Road — leading to several valued relationships. As just one datapoint, it was through Rajeev’s introduction that Refocus Imaging obtained its funding.
Rajeev truly was a pillar of Stanford Computer Science and of Silicon Valley. He touched and helped so many people — as students, advisees, entrepreneurs, colleagues and friends. He directly or indirectly contributed to the formation and the success of numerous startups (Google being the most notable, but there are many, many more). I am incredibly thankful to Rajeev for this advice, his mentorship, and the role that he played in guiding me in choosing my path not only as a student, but for life.
I feel truly fortunate to have interacted with and learnt from Prof Motwani. At the same time, I am deeply saddened at his sudden and untimely passing. I sincerely wish Rajeev’s family all the best in this difficult time and beyond.