Come and join us at an exciting IITKEF evening open exclusively to IITK alumni who are founders, VCs and others involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Our keynote speaker, Deep Nishar has had a heck of a journey. From growing up in a 200 sqft apartment in Mumbai with no running water, to now being a Senior Managing Partner with the 100 billion dollars SoftBank Vision Fund and, in between finding time to be a founder of his own company (Patkai Networks), running Google's Asia-Pacific Products Division, and being the Senior VP at LinkedIn running their Products and User Experience Group and grow its user base tenfold from 32M to 347M and revenues from less than 100M to over 2B. And, lest we forget, he also found time to get a Harvard MBA (Baker Scholar) and teach Product Management courses at Stanford. Amazing experience and it will be fun to hear his insights.

This event is sponsored by Morgan Stanley and it will be represented by Greg Vaughan who is a Managing Director in their Private Wealth Management Group. Greg manages more than 20B dollars for his clients (more than most VC funds) and has been featured in Barron's top ten Financial Advisors since the ranking was incepted 13 years ago and has ranked #1 for 6 of those years. Over the decades, he has navigated through the various economic cycles and his reflections on those and the current state of the markets should be very interesting too.

Please RSVP at the earliest. Due to space constraints, seating is limited to 60 people and this is sure to be a well-attended event. Please confirm by responding to host@iitkef.com.

Most companies have the classical strategy of starting with a product that fits into a targeted market (product market fit) and when reasonably successful or looking ahead into realizing the ceiling of said market, expand to adjacent products, and if successful, over time transform into a platform player. Salesforce is a classic example.

Many other companies started with an ambitious goal of being a "category maker" or "platform player" but with little success due to lack of having initial product market fit which eventually led them to becoming more practical or in many cases resetting.

Sunil will talk about the learnings at Nutanix (and some of our emerging peers) that were "born as platform companies under the shroud of a product company". Our thesis is that while successful single product companies are worth billions of dollars, and multi product companies can be worth 10s of billions, true "born as platform" players can become iconic companies of our time.

Sunil Potti is Chief Product and Development Officer at Nutanix. Prior to Nutanix, he was the VP/GM for the NetScaler business at Citrix and spent time at F5, Cisco and Sybase over the years.

Mark D. McLaughlin became vice chairman of the board of directors for Palo Alto Networks in June 2018, following his retirement as the company's chief executive officer and chairman of the board. Mark joined the company as president and chief executive officer in 2011 and became chairman in 2012. Prior to that, he held a number of key positions at Verisign, including serving as chief operating officer, executive vice president of Products and Marketing, and head of the company's Naming Services business. Prior to Verisign, he was the vice president of Sales and Business Development for Signio, a leading internet payment company. Before joining Signio, he was the vice president of Business Development for Gemplus, the world's leading smart-card company. Previous to Gemplus, he also served as general counsel of Caere Corporation and practiced law as an attorney with Cooley Godward Kronish LLP.

For nearly a decade, Mark has had the honor of serving as a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a body that for more than 30 years has brought industry chief executives together to provide counsel on national security policy and technical issues to the U.S. president and the national security leadership. Mark has served two-year terms as chairman and vice chairman of the NSTAC. He received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Seattle University School of Law and his B.S. degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He served as an attack helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army and earned his Airborne Wings. Mark currently also serves on the board of directors for Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM).

Asheem has invested in over two dozen technology companies, including many at founding or early-stage, several of which have gone public, and multiple which have been acquired in strong M&A outcomes. He has helped create and grow multiple enterprise businesses to market-leading positions - both as a venture capitalist (2003 - present), and previously at companies (1988 - 2002). Asheem has been listed in the Forbes Midas List as a top technology investor for the last six years. In 2017, he was included in the New York Times list of the top twenty venture capitalists worldwide.

His current company boards and investments include Aquantia, Avi Networks, Awake Security, Delphix, Innovium, Obsidian Security, Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Rubrik and Skyhigh Networks.

Previous company boards and/or investments include AppDynamics (CSCO), Arista Networks (ANET), Aruba Networks (HPE), Aquantia (AQ), CipherTrust (INTC), Imperva (IMPV), NetBoost (INTC), PortAuthority Technologies (WBSN), Securent (CSCO), Sourcefire (CSCO), Sumo Logic, TechProcess (Ingenico), Xsigo Systems (ORCL), and Zenprise (CTXS).

Asheem joined Greylock from Check Point Software, where he was vice-president of business development and product management. During his 6+ year tenure, Check Point grew from $10M to $500M+ in annual revenues. Prior to Check Point, Asheem was vice-president of marketing with CoroNet Systems (a venture-backed startup acquired by Compuware), where he helped create and define a new category for application-aware network monitoring. Previously, Asheem held strategic marketing and product line positions with SynOptics/Bay Networks and AT&T Bell Laboratories. During his 3+ year tenure at SynOptics/Bay, the company grew from $175M to $900M+ in annual revenues. At AT&T Bell Labs, Asheem represented AT&T at IETF standards committees for TCP/IP management protocols.

Asheem's additional prior company advisory roles and/or investments (in an individual capacity) include Alteon WebSystems (NT), BigBand Networks (BBND), FineGround Networks (CSCO), Neoteris (JNPR), Rainfinity (EMC), Secure Computing (MCAF), Selectica (SLTC), VitalSigns Software (BT) and Whole Security (SYMC).

Born and raised in India, Asheem holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Case Western Reserve University.

Jyoti Bansal was the founding CEO of AppDynamics which was acquired by Cisco for $3.7b earlier this year. Jyoti founded AppDynamics in 2008 with the vision of "Application Intelligence" to help modern enterprises embark on their journey of digital transformation with a disruptive approach to managing their software applications.

Jyoti has been a recipient of many leadership awards. In 2013, he was selected by Forbes as a "Best Cloud Computing CEO to Work For." In 2014, he was named "Best CEO" by San Francisco Business Times at the Annual Tech & Innovation Awards, was an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2014 & 2015 Award Finalist in Northern California, and received the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2016 Award in the Technology category in Northern California.

Before founding AppDynamics in 2008, Jyoti held engineering roles at various Silicon Valley startups, including Wily Technology, Inc. (acquired by CA, Inc.), Datasweep, Inc. (acquired by Rockwell Automation Inc.), and netLens Inc. (acquired by NextPage Inc., and subsequently acquired in part by FAST Search and Transfer ASA, later acquired by Microsoft Corporation). Jyoti received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

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How should an entrepreneur consider market size for a new technology or product - perhaps one so new that there are no reports, studies or comparables? Using previously confidential emails of investment decisions in companies such as YouTube, Ashmeet Sidana will highlight the key pitfalls and simple techniques every entrepreneur should consider.

 

Ashmeet is the Founder and Managing Partner of Engineering Capital. Prior to that he was a General Partner at Foundation Capital and also has had  operating executive roles at VMWare, Silicon Graphics and HP. He received an MBA from Wharton, MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and a BS in Computer Science summa cum laude from USC. In his spare-time he can be found planning his second trip to Mt. Everest.

 

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We also have an exciting Ask-A-Founder Panel of truly seasoned entrepreneurs who are happy to share their own experiences, whether it is about the initial spark, funding, growth, culture, mistakes, timing, or even the role of luck.  It is in an audience Q&A format moderated by Ramneek Bhasin (founder NextForce, Mobio, Vialto).

 

Our panelists include:

 

Rajiv Batra:  

Co-founder Palo Alto Networks (PANW)

 

Anand Jagannathan:

CEO iStorez, founder Responsys (acquired by Oracle) founder Reach Software, founder Banyan Systems

 

Pavan Nigam:

GP Inspovation Ventures, Co-founder WebMD (WBMD), Co-founder Cendura (acquired by CA)

Mike Robbins is a TED speaker, author and coach who delivers keynotes and seminars to groups around the world including Google, Nutanix, Wells Fargo, eBay, Gap, Adobe, Schwab, and the San Francisco Giants. He has written three books, Focus on the Good Stuff, Be Yourself Everyone Else is Already Taken, and, Nothing Changes Until You Do, which have been translated into 14 different languages.

Dheeraj Pandey, (IITK CSE 1997), will tell us about his Nutanix journey from its founding in 2009 to 2000+ employees spread over 40 countries today.

Dheeraj is a co-founder and CEO of Nutanix. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was the VP of Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases. Dheeraj is a Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of CS. He has a BS in CS from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Kanpur), where he was adjudged the “Best All-Rounder Student Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines”. He is also a recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2015.

Gokul, often dubbed as "The Godfather of Adsense", is one of silicon valley's most recognized and highly regarded product executives today. He has played a critical role in the growth of companies such as Google, Facebook and Square. 

In this fireside chat, he will share with us his journey in silicon valley and his insights on what it takes for a product with great initial traction to evolve into a massive business with an insurmountable moat around it. 

About the speaker

Gokul Rajaram, Square's Product Engineering Lead, oversees software development for Square's marketing software services and leads growing food delivery service,
Caviar. He was most recently the Product Director of Ads at
Facebook, where he drove product development and execution for Facebook's advertising products.

Prior to joining Facebook, Rajaram co-founded Chai Labs where he acted as CEO before the company was acquired by Facebook in August 2010. Earlier in his career, Rajaram was Product Management Director for Google AdSense, where he developed software products for millions of small businesses all around the world. Rajaram earned a Masters in Business Administration from MIT Sloan in 2001, a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where he received the President of India's Gold Medal for being class valedictorian.

Google has over 100 products today including mobile, web, IoT, hardware, OS, cloud and developer tools. Similar to the startup world, several new products are launched every year, while others are deadpooled. 

In this fireside chat, we will learn by examples of how one product went from concept to launch to scale, and another that was stagnant and was rejuvenated to high usage and growth again. 

About the speaker

Anjali Joshi is Vice President of Product Development at Google, where she leads the New Search Products team. The focus of her team is to build new search experiences optimized for mobile devices.  Some of the products that her team works on are real-time content search, interaction on the search page, health, image, and photos search.  

Previously at Google she led product management teams for Maps, Translate, News, Finance, Cloud services and Global Infrastructure.   

Prior to joining Google, Anjali was Executive Vice-President of Engineering at Covad Communications, the first DSL Competitive Carrier in the US. She was also Principal Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Labs where she led projects to build the first large scale high speed data networks in the US. 

She received her Master's degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from the State University of New York, and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Kanpur.  She was selected as one of the top 50 alumni who have graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in the last 50 years. She has served in advisory roles to start-ups and on the board of TIE, Silicon Valley.

Manish Chandra is the founder and CEO of Poshmark, the leading mobile marketplace for fashion which makes it simple and fun for anyone to shop the most fashionable closets across the country and sell directly from their own. Manish has always been passionate about building communities and founded the first social shopping company, Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2007. With Poshmark, Manish has applied his understanding of technology to change the way women think about shopping, building a passionate community based around people’s love for each other and their closets. Manish received a BTech from IIT Kanpur, MS from UT Austin and an MBA from Haas School of Business.

Rajiv is the Founder of Palo Alto Networks and was responsible for building and leading the engineering department from inception until earlier this year. Palo Alto Networks went IPO in 2012 and is currently the third largest enterprise security in the world. Palo Alto networks grew at the rate of 50% over last year and has revenue run rate of $750+ million.

Palo Alto Networks has pioneered the next generation of enterprise security with its innovative platform that allows companies to secure their network and safely enable the increasingly complex and rapidly growing number of applications running on the networks.

At the core of this platform is the Next-Generation Firewall which delivers visibility and control over application, users, and content within the firewall using a highly optimized hardware and software architecture.

Before Palo Alto Networks Rajiv was Vice President of Engineering at Peribit Networks. Rajiv was the first engineering employee of the company and built a high quality engineering team that built industry leading products in the area of WAN Optimization and WAN Acceleration. Peribit Networks was acquired by Juniper Networks in July of 2005.

Prior to Peribit, Rajiv was Founder and VP of Engineering at VitalSigns Networks. VitalSigns Networks allowed the Network Managers, for the first time, to view the Networks from an end-user viewpoint and take proactive actions to resolve network issues. VitalSigns Networks was acquired by International Network Services in October of 1997

Before VitalSigns, Rajiv was Vice President of Engineering at Bay Networks. Prior to Bay Networks Rajiv worked in various engineering management positions at Sequent Computers, Hewlett Packard and Tektronix Inc.

Rajiv was awarded the 2012 Entrepreneurial Achievement Award by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rajiv received his MS in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in December 1983. His undergraduate degree, B Tech, was in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India in 1982.