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CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
BOSTON, (MASSACHUSETTS), OCT 27: Legend has it that Sycamore is an inferior fig tree whose fruit is not as sweet or edible as the more common fig. But at the end of the American century in the roaring nineties, Wall Street has no ear for botany or mythology. Last Friday, when a little known company named Sycamore opened for trading on Nasdaq, there erupted a feeding frenzy that was staggering even given the market's manic Internet standards. Sycamore's Initial Public Offering (IPO) of $38 a share rocketed to $274 in a couple of hours before closing at $185 and giving it a market capitalisation of $14.2 billion in just one day.
At the centre of this stupendous debut stood Gururaj `Desh' Deshpande, a cheerful and unassuming Indian-American who co-founded Sycamore just last year. Desh, as he is known in the Indian community, owns 16.3 million shares of the company, which made him worth (as of Monday evening when Sycamore closed at $ 203) a trifling $ 3.3 billion (Rs 14,000 crores). It also catapulted him tothe top of the richest Indians list, well ahead of Wipro's Aziz Premji ($ 2.8 billion).
But whether it is Deshpande or Premji, money is not the only game in town for the new breed of Indian trailblazers. These two great entrepreneurs represent the best and finest of modern Indian minds and attitudes: Skillful and visionary pioneers who bestride the frontiers of technology as mankind embarks on the age of information. ``We Indians have an advantage in terms of out of box thinking. We come from a very different culture and we look at things differently than Americans. It is turning out to be a huge advantage,'' Deshpande said in an interview at a Silicon Valley meeting earlier this month . For Indian readers, Sycamore can best be introduced as the brother-in-law of India's much-admired company, Infosys. Desh Deshpande is married to the sister of Infosys' celebrated founder-CEO N R Narayana Murthy's wife. Like Murthy a graduate of Bangalore'sNational College, Deshpande is also an IIT-ian who came to the US in the sixties to teach. But like Netscape's Jim Clark, the idea of billions in the market was more appealing than billions on the blackboard. Deshpande founded telecom powerhouse Cascade Communications in the eighties and heralded it to a premier position before selling it to Ascend Communications for hefty $ 3.7 billion in 1997. If that already made him one of the wealthiest Indians in a country where the are now embarrassed if they aren't millionaires, he upped the stakes. Early last year, he founded Sycamore with his Cascade partner Daniel Smith. Sycamore forged ahead at the very acme of cutting edge technology: the use of fibre-optics in communications networks so that data is transmitted using pulses of light rather that electricity. Coming on the heels of the Internet boom (and clog), the idea of cranking up transmission speeds many times was appealing. Net-crazed Wall Street loved it. When it finally debuted last week, Sycamore'ssplash made even mega issues like Yahoo! and Amazon look like mere drops in the pool. The stock opened at 12.45 pm amid a manic stampede, rising to about $ 200 within 15 minutes. On several counts, it was the most successful IPO in history, breaking Wall Street records galore. Its $ 147 increase on debut is the largest ever single-day gain for a stock. Its opening day market cap was the highest realised by a company on stock market debut (by contrast, Yahoo was worth $ 850 million at the end of Day One in April 1996 debut). The tech-tonic coming out set off a chorus of celebration in Massachusetts (where Sycamore is located), whose hi-tech corridor has been upstaged lately by Silicon Valley's Highway 101 and Virginia's Fairfax County. As the Boston Globe gloated last Saturday in its front-paged story, in just one day, a local company with only two customers set Wall Street on fire and became the state's fourth highest company in terms of market value behind behemoths like EMC Corp, Gillette, andFirst Boston Corp, besides dwarfing other giants like Raytheon and Staples. Even the weighty New York Times, which is rarely impressed by debutant splashes on Wall Street, opened its business page story on Sycamore gushing, ``It is not often that a stock can drop $ 85 in an afternoon and still be a spectacular success, but it happened yesterday to Sycamore Networks Inc.'' Sycamore is just the latest tree in a garden of riches that the Indian-American community is tending to at the turn of the millennium. Like Sycamore, Juniper Networks Inc, which is in related area, opened at $ 34 a share in June and closed last week at $ 261, giving it a market cap of $12.5 billion. Cerent, another cutting edge company, was acquired by Cisco for $ 7 billion earlier this year. Both companies have the fingerprint of the celebrated Indian venture capital tycoon Vinod Khosla, a man so busy and peripatetic that his aide returned a message for an interview last week asking if we were okay with ten minutes at 11.20 am onNovember 18. The belief that anything an Indian touches in the tech world is destined for gold is taking on an awesome sheen in Silicon Valley. Not a week passes in the US without the story of another Indian making it big. Says Shridhar Mukund, formerly of C-Dot in India and now a chip architect at Lightspeed Semiconductors, ``There was a notion once that you had to have a white guy in the team to succeed. These days companies like to have an Indian on the team to be successful. Being Indian has a premium value now.'' India may not have produced great explorers like Marco Polo or Columbus, but when the history of the Information Revolution is written, you can bet there will be a few Indian names - and it won't be in the footnotes. From Sam Pitroda to Sabeer Bhatia, they have come a long way. But judging from the events in 1999, the journey may have just begun. (Next: The Indians Are Coming, The Indians are Coming: How the Curry Brigade invaded Silicon Valley) Copyright © 1999 Indian ExpressNewspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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