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This interesting article is from 2/13 The Seattle Times:

India.net: Microsoft, cultural ties link Indian immigrants leading online ventures

by Gordon Black

Pradeep Singh ushers three visitors into his office overlooking Lake Washington. They all gravitate to the large windows offering a lake vista. It's an impressive view.

Almost immediately, the guests comment on the office and its location. They especially want to know the cost of such space, at Kirkland's Carillon Point.

It's a reasonable starting point for chitchat among four people in the software industry, and for whom Eastside real-estate prices are a fact of business life. Never mind that they all earned undergraduate degrees in India or that they are all first-generation immigrants to the United States.

Singh and his visitors - Deepak Amin, Digvijay Chauhan and Vijay Vashee - are members of what has become a growing club, Indian-educated ex-Microsoft software professionals who have helped create Web start-ups in the Puget Sound area. Naveen Jain and Raghav Kher are also members of this unofficial group, which numbers about 10 and is growing.

It's a high-tech masala, curry-dot-com in Silicon Forest, where a generation of Indian immigrants enriched by Microsoft stock options are creating new companies with names like InfoSpace.com, Imandi.com, AskMe.com and vJungle.com.

All products of an intensely competitive education system, most came to America to pursue advanced degrees and soon gravitated to a software industry hungry for talented engineers. Each has a story to tell of overcoming challenges and hardship on the way to financial security.

And each has a drive that may be a combination of personal and cultural that is best summed up in one way: Failure is not an option.

In becoming entrepreneurs, they are following a trail created by a handful of engineers in California, who, faced with a promotion ceiling, began networking to form their own businesses in the early '80s.

"There is a perception that there was an old boys' network here (in Silicon Valley) and it was hard for immigrants to pierce that," said Annalee Saxenian, a professor of regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. "There have been several high-profile successes that have made it easier for Indians and Chinese to achieve success."

In a study, Saxenian identified 22 companies in Silicon Valley either started or managed by Indian immigrants, including perhaps the best-known, Sun Microsystems, co-founded in 1982 by Vinod Khosla, a leading venture capitalist in the technology sector.

Saxenian said success among the pioneers inspired those who came later. "There is a very strong Indian network," she said. "These guys are in very close contact with one and other."

In Silicon Valley, Indian engineers grouped together to help each other. In the Puget Sound area, the common denominator for the recent start-ups is Vijay Vashee.

A soft-spoken 49-year-old who grew up in Zimbabwe, Vashee could claim the title of elder statesman of Indian software professionals at Microsoft. He reckons he has helped 200 fellow Indians since he joined the Redmond company almost 18 years ago.

The Microsoft connection is another commonality. "In Microsoft, they make that joke about the IM network, the Indian Mafia network," said Kher, chief executive officer of one of the start-ups, Imandi.com. "It has no negative connotation. It is just about the bond and how the news travels faster through the unofficial channel than through the official channel."

There are some very good reasons for the Indian connection: India produces more technically qualified graduates than any other country.

Additionally, software companies often assert they need anywhere from 190,000 to 350,000 skilled information-technology workers to make up for the jobs the domestic work force can't fill.

Accordingly, Indians claimed the largest number of H1-B visas - the type intended to be set aside for specialty occupations that the U.S. labor force cannot itself fulfill.

Many of them trained at the India Institute of Technology, which is highly regarded around the world for the quality of its graduates.

IIT has five campuses around the subcontinent, including in Bangalore, Delhi and Bombay, which not so coincidentally have become incubators for India's indigenous high-tech industries.

Such is the reputation of IIT that, to recruiters, an engineering degree from there holds the same stature as one from Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University. Gaining admission to IIT might be even tougher than getting into the top schools in the U.S.

"The year I applied, 50,000 applied and 1,800 were given admission," said Vashee. "Today, it is 150,000 applicants. You know what it means to be competitive in a very fierce way."

Competition, in fact, is a feature of the education system in India from the earliest years of schooling, said Sutapa Basu, director of the Women's Center at the University of Washington, also a native of India.

"There is a huge push for education," she said. "Because it is so competitive there is tremendous pressure for students to do well - by both parents and society."

Basu said this drive is particular among middle- and upper-middle-class families. "They are pushing both girls and boys, but in the lower classes that is not always the case," she said.

By the time students are ready to enroll in college, they must all take the national Joint Entrance Exam, or JEE, in which everyone's performance is ranked.

The joke among Indian engineers here is that when they first meet they ask what each other's JEE ranking was.

"I was 270th," said Pradeep Singh, who co-founded Talisma and studied electrical engineering at IIT in Delhi. "I will know that until the day I die."

Along with the competitiveness comes a mindset - a willingness to take risks, said Deepak Amin, the entrepreneur who founded vJungle.com.

And there may be something else, too. "A lot of it is luck," said Kher. "It was luck that I got into Microsoft, but compared to a lot of people who are smart or smarter than I am . . . we were in the right industry at the right time."

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......Jen

-- posted by JenL_2