Forget the Nasdaq, BSE is hot Vikas Singh [ Saturday, December 03, 2005 11:42:50 pmTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
NEW DELHI: For 16 years, he was the intellect inside Intel, the man who worked on the 386 and 486 chips, then pioneered the path breaking Pentium. Then the urge to explore new frontiers bit him. It was time for Gen Next.
Or should we say Nexgen — a start-up that Dham joined, which was later bought by AMD, Intel's arch-rival. AMD used Nexgen know-how to create K6, a chip that was lauded for being faster than Pentium, to the fury of Andy Grove, Intel's legendary former CEO.
''Andy told the guys in Intel he never wanted to see anything like that again. A lot of old friends called me to complain I had made life horrible for them,'' chuckles Silicon Valley legend Vinod Dham, still looking fit at 55.
There's a nostalgic look in his eyes. Then they start to sparkle as he talks about his present role as venture capitalist, tapping the ''fantastic talent'' in India.
A second later, he's just as passionately lamenting the ''pathetic state of India's infrastructure''. So where does he stand? ''I'm a proud but impatient Indian,'' he responds. ''Proud of the way India is changing. Impatient because it isn't changing fast enough.''
Let's start with the good part. Dham is co-founder of New Path Ventures, a $100-million fund looking to invest in companies engaged in hardware and ''intellectual property creation as opposed to labour arbitrage''. And he's excited.
''A company we've invested in, Nevis, is launching a product that can reduce cost of the kind of switches Cisco makes to one-tenth, have matching performance and be totally secure. And the entire research was done in Pune!''
Another of New Path's investments, telecom equipment manufacturer Telcima, is planning to shift its headquarters from the US to India. ''India is getting hotter by the day. A few years ago, our investors weren't confident about companies headquartered in India. Today, they'd all rather be listed on the BSE than on Nasdaq.''