A Pakistani-Indian Joint Tech Entrepreneurship in

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Indian, Pakistani partners look to build on tech successes
Knight Ridder - Thursday, October 20, 2005


The Dallas Morning News

By Jim Landers

DALLAS _ Rashad Ali and Pulin Patel, two friends originally from Pakistan and India, are running the race for the Next Big Thing on cell phones from a humble office off the back streets of Richardson, Texas' Telecom Corridor.

They're seeking a technology to tame the flood of media and communications that wash across our desks, kitchen tables and entertainment centers, so it can all be poured into a portable handset.

Lots of entrepreneurs are working the same problem, around the world and around the block from Ali and Patel. What makes their story stand out? A winning record. An unusual friendship. And the fact that they could be doing this anywhere, but prefer to stay home in North Texas.

In 1999, the two men teamed with Patel's brother-in-law, Achal Patel, and launched IPMobile Inc. in Richardson. They'd borrowed $300,000 from family and friends with an idea for merging wireless telecommunications and the Internet.

"Looking back, some of them should not have done this," said Ali. "They bet on us. They didn't understand the technology."

Venture capitalists who did understand provided another $6.5 million.

One year later, Cisco Systems Inc. bought IPMobile for $425 million. Family and friends got a 40-fold return on their money. The venture capitalists also made out, as did the company founders.

Ali and Patel helped out at Cisco for a while, then started providing seed money to other promising companies. Alcatel bought one of those for $300 million, and Pulin Patel joined Alcatel.

Last year, Ali and Achal Patel convinced Pulin Patel they'd come up with another idea, so he joined them in the quest for the world-in-a-handset. The new company is called Mavenir Systems.

Ali, 42, and Pulin Patel, who is 35, met in Richardson when both were working at Nortel Networks. Karachi is Rashad's hometown. Pulin hails from Baroda, near India's western border with Pakistan. Today they are the type of friends who finish each other's sentences.

"He's from Pakistan. I'm from India. You see very few of those," said Patel.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars with each other. In the years since both acquired nuclear weapons, they've gone to the brink twice.

"In my view, the populations need to grow up," said Patel. "There are bigger battles to fight in the global economy. They've got to get beyond this, `He said, she said.'"

After selling IPMobile, Ali and Patel looked in various parts of the world for other projects. The experience locked in their faith in the American economic system as the best place for innovation and entrepreneurship.

"There are certain skill sets in the United States that can't be replicated in China or India," Ali said.

"And skill sets systems," Patel added.

In Britain, they were surprised to learn how the system discourages taking risks.

"If you fail once, you can never do it again. You're blacklisted as far as ever being a director of a company," Ali said.

Ali and Patel saw one of their companies go under three years ago, when they started a firm called Glacier Networks in the Telecom Corridor's darker days. They believe Glacier's technology was too far ahead of the market.

Now they see Telecom Corridor ready to grow again.

"On the heels of the failure everybody's been through, the time is now to create the next stage," Ali said.

Texas Instruments Inc. has made tremendous advances in digital signal processing power; ditto for mobile communications and broadband, he said.

Ali and Patel work side by side at a table with their laptops and handsets. Achal Patel and 13 others are down the hall. A second small team works for Mavenir in Shanghai, China, and a couple more researchers are in Seoul, South Korea, and Bangalore, India.

"We're starting out in an environment where talent has effectively spread around the world," Pulin said. "We as prudent entrepreneurs want to leverage that. The days when start-up tech companies could raise $100 million to $200 million are over. Now, it's back to basics. You need to do it for $15 to $20 million or less."