NEW YORK, OCT 23: The market debut of Sycamore Networks, a fibre optics networking firm, is being called the hottest of the year and has also vaulted its Indian American founder to the ranks of a billionaire. Founded by Gururaj Deshpande, the Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based company's stock, offered at $38 per share, opened at an astonishing $280 when trading began on the Nasdaq, but closed at a lower $184.75, still over seven times the offer price. The gains for the company, which enables fibre optic networking technology, were still larger because the lead managers, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, more than doubled the offer price from the initial range of $18 to $20 per share after unexpected level of interest from investors.Deshpande, who sold his earlier venture, Cascade Communications, to Ascend for $3.7 billion, holds over a fifth of Sycamore's stock. At the stock's closing price, Deshpande's shares were worth over $3 billion and the company itself was valued at about $14.5 billion. The success ofSycamore comes close on the heels of another Indian venture, Satyam Infoway, the second Indian company to list its shares on Nasdaq. Satyam's stock also more than doubled from its initial price of $18 per share and on October 22 closed at $40.Deshpande is an entrepreneur who has brought powerful academic insights into the real business world. In 1990, still years before the Internet would turn so ubiquitous, he started Cascade on one central principle: every computer in the world will be connected to another. He made the company public and in 1997, even as Cascade's stock price declined, sold it to Ascend.Post-merger, he soon bored with working at Ascend and, bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, started Sycamore on the belief that computers and networks are greedy for faster access and more bandwidth. The company, by focussing on the hot fibre optic technology, has developed the SN6000, its only product so far, which enables existing networks to use their bandwidth more efficiently.Deshpande, agraduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai, received a doctorate degree in data communications from Queens University in Kingston, Canada. He then went on to join the faculty there. He was a professor there before a chance meeting with a Motorola executive brought him into the corporate world. He worked for a Motorola subsidiary, Codex Corporation, in Canada but his first venture as an entrepreneur bombed. Entering the United States, he co-founded Coral Network Corporation. In 1990, he broke up with his partner and started the hugely successful Cascade.
