close window 
Entrepreneurs must stay open to opportunities that present themselves, said Gururaj Deshpande, chairman of A123Systems, Tejas Networks, and Sycamore Networks. “If you’re too uptight about what you want to do, you may miss some of these opportunities,” Deshpande said during the afternoon keynote at TechVision Conference 2008, presented by the High-Tech Group, at Harper Center February 29.
For example, Deshpande realized three months into his first start-up that he and his partner clashed on how to handle their product. Despite struggling with no salary for 12 months to raise $3 million to launch the company, one day he simply announced he was leaving. “I knew in a little company you can’t have two people running the company who don’t get along,” Deshpande said. “That was probably the toughest piece of my career.”
One of the most fun companies to build has been A123Systems, which found a way to successfully recharge lithium batteries to retain and deliver great power, he said. Black & Decker spent $18 million to design a commercial power-tool set using the technology and General Motors is “bullish” on a purely electric car it plans to introduce in 2010 employing the batteries, Deshpande said.
Deshpande has made a practice of starting one for-profit and one not-for-profit company each year. The MIT Corporation’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation was created to identify efficient ways to innovate, he said. “The center of gravity for innovation in the U.S. has moved back to universities, which in some ways creates a bad supply chain,” Deshpande said. “We have found a systematic way to connect innovators at MIT to relevance in the market place.”
Deshpande used the same approach to help develop a midday lunch program – one of 50 social entrepreneurship programs he funds in India - that now feeds 830,000 children a day for 10 cents a meal. “The meal is actually very tasty and healthy,” he said. “This is an example of how we can use good management principles and scaling to solve problems.”
Globalization, innovation in technology, and innovation in business cycles will change our lives in the next 10 years as much as they have changed in the last 30 or 40 years, Deshpande said. Two of the biggest areas of innovation in technology will come in energy and life sciences, he said.
“With life sciences, health care is probably the next biggest problem and something people are willing to pay for,” Deshpande said. “Technologically, a lot of medicine so far has been imperfect - a doctor gives something 100 times and it cures 95 times, so why not give it? There’s no fundamental knowledge base that gets built up there. Slowly a lot of it is being advanced from an engineering perspective, so almost everything is getting modeled so they understand a lot more about the systems. Therefore, I think the breakthroughs are going to be much more fundamental.”
The High Tech Group invited Deshpande because it wanted a speaker to address technology in the context of entrepreneurship, said second-year student Adit Singh, co-chair of the student-led group. “We wanted to bring somebody who’s very humble, had very simple backgrounds, and has taken a company, just like the rest of us, from nothing to something,” Singh said. “Secondly, we wanted somebody who doesn’t talk up in the air. He talks with clarity and purpose.”
--Phil Rockrohr