99 pc India dotcoms will fail, says Kanwal Reiki

His three-decade-long career in computers and software and, he says, “sheer hard work and luck”, saw him on the board of Novel, the software giant, before he took retirement in 1995 to become an angel investor’.

One of the biggest success stories he has funded as an angel investor has been the Indian start-up Exodus Communications, a company headed by K B Chandrashekar, who is now a multi-billionaire in America. Rekhi says that for every dollar he had invested in 1995 in Chadrashekar’s start-up company, he now has $1,200 in hand.

Rekhi has had such a successful track record in the now flourishing area of information technology — incidentally, he was the first India-born CEO to get a company listed on the NASDAQ — that when he talks of a mere 1 per cent success rate, people take his predictions seriously. He is now President, The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TIE), a non-profit organisation based in California that is trying to engage Indians and Americans in a big way in the information technology sector.

He recently donated from his own personal wealth $5 million for the setting up of a new information technology school at IIT, Mumbai, which earned him the title of Santa Claus Rekhi’, also reflecting his genial nature.

Rekhi says the “intense euphoria” over information technology is most useful since more and more sharp brains keep jumping into the fray, leading to intense competition, which invariably results in a shake-out. He told the audience, which comprised mostly technology students, that failure’ was a part of the process of blossoming of entrepreneurship in India. He exhorted that failure should not be viewed as such a bad word since only “contrarian thinking” could breed success in the competitive world of e-commerce and Internet. He added that as an angel investor, he always placed his bet on a once failed entrepreneur since such a person usually has “double the fire” in his belly and has a determined will to succeed.

Rekhi also took a broad swipe at some of the policies of the Indian Government, like the Finance Minister’s recent Budget announcement for opening up and promoting venture capital funds. He said the starting of a venture fund by the Indian Government was “the most idiotic thing he had ever heard”, and this really had the audience in splits. He said he had conveyed the same to the Finance Minister who, according to Rekhi, was actually expecting praise for this move on part of the Government.

Rekhi pointed out that for any venture capital financing to succeed, one needs venture capitalists, and this breed of visionary risk-takers of the new economy is really nowhere to be seen on the horizon in India. “You can’t expect bureaucrats to overnight become venture capitalists,” feels Rekhi. For a bureaucrat, whether a venture capital investment succeeds or fails may be of little consequence since “there is no sweat on his back” and his job is always secure.

But, for all its shortcomings, Rekhi still feels “information technology is beginning to energise the Indian nation and there is now new hope in the young minds of India”.