 So I think this was really great. I'm not sure if everybody else is in the same background, but I was a part of the privileged generation too. I can really account for some of the bad energy that was a part of the Silicon Valley in the late 90s was this really special place where there was just this constant whisper of why don't we start up that was in the background of every conversation you had. At the time I was working for Sun Microsystems in sort of the mid 90s when Java first came out the dot and yeah exactly the dot and dot com and it was just prevalent like we all had friends who had started up and made a lot of money and we were all just watching the market boom it was just incredibly just right there that if we you know that this opportunity was available to us that we knew people who had been successful we so the whole ecosystem was there. It's actually why I'm in India a little bit is because I feel some of that here it's not quite as dense as it was in Silicon Valley in the late 90s but they're starting to be more like startup energy in India right now where I mean it must be why you're here to some degree it's it's like they're starting to be some feel in general perception I'll say around the world that it's possible that like the next Google comes from India you know that the you know of of the opportunities coming like India is now like at the front at the front of the pack like and and while it's not as concentrated as the Silicon Valley was like there's there's still a big a big push a lot of entrepreneurial spirit and starting to be money another aspect of the Valley in the 90s that's interesting to talk about is it was the first time I think in history where where large institutional money really took a bet on youth there was you know like I got I did a startup I got funded I was like 24 25 a lot of you know the the other people from the Java group who started Marimba you know they were all like billionaires by this time and they were all in their late 20s we actually had I had some friends who went to get funding and they wore suits and they felt like they didn't get funded because the VCs all thought that they were like accounting reps you know and and they all just had this perception that like this revolution the internet revolution that was changing everything that only the young understood it like and and they were willing to bet significant amounts of money on on you know very inexperienced people and and they just and they appreciated the culture that came with with youth and and sort of like you were saying too of like there was both it was a very healthy relationship and that there was both an appreciation for some of the comic aspects of having very young teams where we all slept at work we played ping pong our VCs gave us a ping pong table but at the same time they also they also treated like us like intelligent adults and that we had board meetings where we were expected to to make firm commitments on what we were going to be able to deliver and and to follow up and so so that part of things was was really neat so I did one startup it was successful and then since then I've been a part of like a number of other startups both in in Silicon Valley and in India and now I'm sort of looking at starting an incubator as my next startup so so my my vision on an incubator I've been you know thinking about this a lot it's a little bit different than a lot of what you've been hearing but it's it's it's worth talking through again my background is all with technology so so that sort of tempers some of it some thoughts think about think about an incubator as as a business and in the you know you have you have your raw materials you have the the teams the people that they come into your system that you decide to work with you have your you know it's sort of like your plant which is like working on taking these raw materials and refining them into like products your product are the companies that that are coming out like and and be clear about this from a couple of perspectives one is this notion that the that you're trying to help make these teams as as pretty and marketable as possible and that means filling out the team it means refining the ideas you know a number of things but even more importantly it means you have to be clear about who you're selling them to like the you know it's it's very difficult to have a market where you're just creating product and you're not clear about about what the exit is how you're how you're offloading your your goods in in the venture capital world this is this is either exits or IPOs like you know if all you're doing is equity like if because you know these people aren't giving you cash so so you're getting equity in exchange for you know putting in a bunch of time and resources you need to be clear that there's a path that you have a path to where where you're gonna sell this thing you know and it doesn't necessarily have to be an acquisition though you know it's either an acquisition or that you have a path to investors who are large enough to be able to take the company to the to the IPO stage like going you know going the the big win route is going to take a lot of help so you know as an incubator your customer will be the VCs whose business is to take it the the rest of the way so you know as an incubator the the term I hear a lot here is is this pre incubation and that's what I at least it's the area that I'm interested in it's most most VCs in India aren't interested in aren't interested in first-time entrepreneurs they it's it's just sort of the way it's netted out is that the there's a lot of like raw young talent that's like interested in the VCs are skeptical on working with them and so there's a lot of I think that there's a big opportunity to work with young people and then give them this like initial it's called sort of seed funding to get them to the point where they're credible they have prototypes they have some traction so they can talk to VCs so going through so there's these three parts to to the the system you have to be good at recruiting like it's it's kind of your your bread and butter if you don't have good good ingredients good materials good people your outputs not gonna be great the things to look for I think our number one is commitment like like that everybody has said you know your the ideas are gonna change substantially over time you know like if it's something that my friends used always said just look for a light behind the eyes like you need to be really clear that like they're they're going to do it like they're they're going there's gonna be all kinds of heartache like they need to like be committed enough to to go through it they need to be bright and then the other thing that I think is important is is sort of this is to pick a space like like in your case it's like I don't even totally understand all the details of like you know MPLS but like you know you're a professor of electrical engineering at IIT Bombay and you're in core network services it's like I don't know what you're doing but if you're doing anything interesting in an area that's totally fundamental to like you know how like networks operate then like okay we'll figure out what the idea is you know exactly I at least appreciate that that you're smart and that we're in an interesting space and that like there's going to be interesting ideas here and so so so we can take the time to like let those things fall out and I think that that's some of what you get from the incubator the mentorship section I think is really is really important it's that's really I think like what what you do like what your actions are some things that I've seen in some incubators register the companies yeah like you know if people are if people are committed then then like take the effort to actually get them set up until until companies actually exist like they can't they can't have agreements with anybody and so and so just legally you're just in this kind of like limbo unless you actually help them get set up there's also giving them help with the accounting like the the thing you want to focus on is like your your entrepreneurs they're like a bunch of young guys they're they have an idea they want to work on it like you as as an incubator what you're really providing is sort of like the adult supervision and kind of trying to take care of all of the administrative and like miscellaneous crap that that gets in people's way as they're trying to work on their business and so so that's that's that's a large part of your role there's another thing that comes in handy is one problem that young entrepreneurs face sometimes when they start up is that they just go they suddenly go from this environment where where they've been working in a in a company where you know people have been expecting things from them regularly or they've been in school where they alignments and then all of a sudden they're on their own and there's nobody really looking over their shoulder to see whether or not they do anything you know and you know yeah they should be working but we should all be working it's really useful to have like weekly meetings where people have to present what they've done over the last week and they have to talk about what they're going to do the next week you know even if you don't understand a word they say the fact that the fact that they have to make this meeting that they have to sort of go and and do it it it's going to orient them around like you know making sure that they do something they there's some accountability like even if you don't understand the details like part of part of your role in an incubator I think is providing some of this accountability that would typically come from senior management or your management like now you're doing a startup you don't have management your investors become your managers and then a large part I think is this networking and I've almost cautioned people to really introspect and think about like how good your network is like because you need you know a lot of the teams coming to you are going to be incomplete which means that you know it'll be a couple of geeky guys and you know they need someone who can take care of business or marketing or you know there'll be some some missing parts of it and part of what should happen is that you should be able to connect with those people and help to form complete teams and then you you know like I was saying before you need to be able to connect these people with the investors or the or the companies the partners the clients who can take them to the next level like in at least with the kind of incubator I'm interested in like the I'm not interested in in trying to hold somebody's hand for years and years and years while they establish the business like I want to work with people up to the point where they can demonstrate where they can demonstrate the idea demonstrate that you know that they are capable of doing something interesting and present this to people whose job it is to take them to the next level or to work with these people in some sort of professional way but that all comes down to like whether or not you can actually orchestrate these connections the the other disadvantage of of working with first time entrepreneurs is that almost by definition their networks are weak like you know they they're either just out of college or they have a couple of years but but they they don't yet have the experience to be able to have the conversations that they need in order to close deals and so and so it's it's one of the places where I mean it's why real VCs fun like experienced entrepreneurs it's largely for the network if you have this network if you can take advantage of this network whether it's your alumni or you know your personal friends or something then that that'll help a lot with you know being provided that being able to provide this critical element that's necessary for starting up but but it's like for a startup you don't necessarily need to have that guy on full-time if you can get it from your investors if you can get it from an incubator the maybe my last point here so so that's on the cell like you need to be able to exit these things like in my opinion you shouldn't you shouldn't hold on indefinitely so three quick things for for me success is either an IPO which means that you know at the incubation level that we were able to get investors it's an acquisition a lot of times now people are doing these early-stage acquisitions and so if you can sell a company to somebody else they get you know a team of proven engineers who you know can demonstrate that they've been working on some interesting technology at a low cost you know it's like everybody everybody wins and then the third thing which I respect though it's not it's not at all respected in the Valley is just being profitable if like in my opinion it's a valid business model to get into service but it's important to know it's important to know whether service is an outcome like it being an ongoing service type business is a potential outcome if if what you're doing is taking equity as compensation then getting then you're never going to get your money back and the fact that you created a business is not going to help you at all and so and so be careful in how you structure your deals with your companies using some combination of equity and debt to the properly reflects the type of business that everybody thinks is being created if people are creating a service business that's just going to be generating income but isn't going to really have a significant amount of like equity value then then structure structure things is some sort of loan that needs to get paid back if it's a suit for the moon IPO type thing then equity is a good idea or you can mix these things one other thing I'd like to just point to quickly is there's another kind of incubator in the US that I think is really really interesting and it's what I'm interested in it's called the white combinator so it's worth it's worth looking at you know even if you don't even if you don't do that model exactly it it addresses some of the the issues I see with a lot of business incubators of like you know they really focus on just getting a flow of companies through and and moving quickly that's it