By Michael F. Carmichael
Oct. 7, 2010
“Dr. Desh” is what everyone seems to call him, and it’s understandable considering his full name is Gururaj Deshpande. And, as one of America’s richest men, you’d expect him to want to talk about his business successes. That he does, to a point. But he also is passionate about his “sandbox” projects – first in his native India and soon to be in his adopted area around Boston.
|
A serial entrepreneur and a co-chair of a Presidential advisory council on innovation, Deshpande will be a keynote speaker at TiECon Midwest 2010 (the acronym stands for Talent, Ideas, Enterprise) in Detroit on October 28 and 29, 2010. Corp! caught up with “Dr. Desh” to get a taste of what he’ll be talking about.
“I started in 1983 with a little Canadian company which had recently been bought up by Motorola. By 1984 we had gone from 20 people to 400. That was my real taste of a startup,” Deshpande laughs. This was after he had come to Canada from India, gotten his M.A. and Ph.D. and taught for a year at university.
“Life can be a series of accidents sometimes,” Deshpande continues. “My wife and I looked at each other and said if we can do this for Motorola we can do this for ourselves.” There was no venture capital in Canada at that time to provide needed funding so Deshpande and his wife moved to Boston in 1984.
In 1987 he founded his first company, Coral Networks. Not long afterward he founded Cascade Communications, which went from one person to more than 1,000 in less than 10 years, creating a $500 million a year business which was acquired for $3.7 billion. In 1998 he started a company called Sycamore Networks, a fiber optic network.
“In 1999 we went public and within a couple of years we had a market capitalization of $50 billion,” Deshpande explains. “After that, I’ve done other companies, but more as the chairman and investor rather than the entrepreneur."
“I joined the MIT Board about 10 years ago,” Deshpande says. “One of the things I wanted to do was see how innovation could be more impactful in terms of contributing to the economy. Historically, a lot of technology had its roots in places like Bell Labs and IBM. They can’t afford to do basic research anymore because of global competition. But now the center of gravity has clearly moved back to U.S. space.”
Deshpande explains that he and his wife wanted to see how research in technology could have “a greater impact on society.” So they contributed $20 million to the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT. “We felt there was a lot more that could be done,” he says. “The core idea behind the Center is that if you have innovation, and you have a desire to have an impact, you have to combine that innovation with relevance.”
“Only when you have a new idea, one that has relevance in the marketplace, do you see that idea have an impact – whether it’s a societal impact or an economic impact.