San Francisco Bay Area Chapter

The event started off with a welcome address by Shailendra Kumar.

After welcoming the gathering to the seminar, Shailendra touched upon the benefits of alumni networking by drawing from his personal experience. He mentioned that his own company has IIT KGP alumni on its advisory board. He encouraged everyone to take an active interest in alumni networking and set the agenda by introducing Arvind Jain, president of IIT Foundation.

Arvind briefly talked about the IIT foundation and mentioned that recently, it has been taken to a higher plane. 5 people have committed $5m each and have promised for their time and involvement also. This is the time to consider major questions like - Is IIT (still) a world class institution? He encouraged everyone to make a trip to IIT (during the golden jubilee) to see for oneself the projects happening there. He named a few initiatives that are being undertaken:

• The face lift to the campus
• High powered VLSI design lab
• A computer in every student's room
• Much needed recognition for teachers
• Trying to ensure that IITKGP gets the best students.

Finally he introduced the speaker, Arjun Malhotra, and ended with an encouragement for the alumni to involve themselves.

Arjun had started out his career by applying for a DCM training position in Delhi with a salary of Rs 950. In part this decision was motivated by the need for a permanent job before getting married! He joined the DCM data products division the moment they entered the calculators area. But soon after, his ideas of building a bit sliced computer ran into trouble with legal red-tape in DCM. So when DCM made a whopping loss due to relaxing of import restrictions and hinted at cost-cutting, he and a bunch of 5 friends decided to do it on their own. On a meagre starting capital of 1.75la, the majority of which was spent on office space in Bombay, they started to compete against the Tatas, DCM etc with just their confidence (but no knowledge of licenses etc). Their strategy of hiring the best guys (from IIM CAL for instance..) seemed to pay fruit and with a 9lakh advance started to sell calculators to finance their computer business.

It was at this time that the name HCL was conceived and the day that they took out a full page advt coincided with the departure of IBM from India. Just when they were ready to deliver their first batch of computers they ran into trouble with excise duty classifications - there being none for microcomputers! They read through the excise manuals and found the import subst code (which was being used for accounting machines from Germany) that finally came to their rescue.

The computer business then was such that no single company had a clear lead - the situation was ideal for Paul (a friend who had gone to the US for MBA) to prepare an insightful report on organizational buying patterns. This was used to address the needs correctly and accordingly position their computers. Soon the business had grown to 14cr and in 1980 they opened an office in Singapore.

[ Arjun mentioned: There were a few crucial reasons for the 6 founders to stick together for 19 years (1) stock decision was taken before starting and they stuck by it (2) they wanted to build a corporation first - money came only later (3) spouses of friends were not influenced ] But HCL decided to enter the software market in the US which did not turn out to be good decision. When things were looking bleak, Arjun was all set to close down business and return to India. But the people were really committed and urged him to continue. This helped them switch to UNIX just when it was picking up.

Though a number of areas (home computers for instance) that HCL tried to enter did not grow as anticipated, it led to a lot of related areas in which it developed expertise. Examples are software distribution, call centers etc.

We live in a period where yet another cycle is picking up (the internet). This is the time for enterpreneurs to step forward and make use of this opportunity - much less energy is needed to go into orbit now than ever before!

Some of the key qualities that are needed for a successful enterpreneur are:

• conviction (what your gut tells you.. not something from spreadsheets)
• ability to handle ambiguities
• use lean/mean advantage against incumbents
• high energy (ability to store sleep!)
• passion for what you do
• a trustworthy team
• never stop listening
• set ethical standards at the beginning and stick by them

Finally the talk ended with a Q&A.

Q1 : Did you stick to initial plans?
A1 : No - plans are made to be changed. There are some high level goals that are fixed but how it was achieved was flexible