Connect with a Mentor
Mentor Connect
Mentor Connect is a flagship program where a structured environment for Mentorship is provided to TiEcon attendees
Date: May 4 - 5, 2023
Time: 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm PST
Location: Hall A1, Santa Clara Convention Center
Register for a TiEcon Pass
Who should attend
- A wantrepreneur looking to validate their idea
- A novice entrepreneur looking for guidance
- A startup founder looking for advise to pivot his/her startup
How is it done
- 60 min time slot with mentor and mentee
- A time slot is booked ahead of the event
- In a small setting (typically 8-10 mentees)
Who are our mentors
- Highly accomplished business professionals
- Silicon Valley veterans and domain experts
- Serial entrepreneurs with a proven track record
Mentors
Deep Experience and Expertise in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, AdTech, Cloud Computing & Distributed Systems.
Led large Product Management Teams to build Multi-Hundred-Million-Dollar businesses in collaboration with Engineering and Sales & Marketing
Niraj Saran has 20+ years of leadership experience at Fortune50 tech companies and is currently an active investor and advisor to startups. Besides having led the first investment in several startups in India and Silicon Valley, Niraj has helped them grow upwards of 10x as a board member and advisor. His area of expertise is in AI/ML and, more specifically, Generative AI, across various industries.
Niraj was the founder of a startup building a monetization platform for Virtual Reality content. Earlier, he was the VP of Engineering at an Education Tech startup acquired by Amazon. He was the co-founder, board member and Chief Technology Officer of a Cloud fulfillment startup headquartered out of Singapore. Prior to that at Microsoft, he was responsible for improving monetization for the Bing adCenter group. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering and M.Sc (Economics) degrees from BITS, Pilani.
Vic is an experienced CXO with 40+ years of demonstrated success. Before joining Si2, Vic was VP & Chief Strategist, Ansys (Nasdaq: ANSS) Semiconductor BU, connecting the dots from chip-package-board-system with Ansys multi-physics, multi-domain simulation technology.
In the electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor industry. He is a strong professional skilled in entrepreneurship, building R&D and product management teams for innovative EDA software targeted for semiconductor IP and chip designers. Vic was instrumental in growing technology portfolio with focused EDA R&D acquisitions and building the enterprise value.
Most recently, Vic was Chief Strategy Officer at Si2, Silicon Integration Initiative, a R&D joint venture enabling technology interoperability for its worldwide member companies. He architected and led the strategy to focus on solutions for the emerging silicon-to-system workflows, addressing technology interoperability challenges in the design and implementation workflows posed by vertical markets
Prabakar is Chief Strategist and Co-founder of The Fabric. Prabakar has a successful track record as a serial entrepreneur. Prabakar has over 25 years of leadership experience in the hi- tech industry where he has held a variety of executive positions spanning engineering, marketing, and business strategy at companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. Prabakar has served on the board of directors and/or technical advisory board of several companies
Previously, Prabakar drove Juniper's content and media strategy and the technology for its media delivery infrastructure solutions, which an outgrowth of Juniper's acquisition of Ankeena, which he co-founded with Rajan. Before Ankeena, Prabakar was at Citrix Systems, driving the technology vision and product strategy of the company's Application Networking Group. Prabakar joined Citrix via its acquisition of NetScaler Inc., where he served as CTO and EVP of Strategic Planning and Corporate Development.
Alagu earned a BE in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, India and a MS in Computer Science at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.
Prashant K. Gulati (PK), is a technology innovator, angel investor, mentor, idea accelerator, and commentator with interests in innovation, startups, entrepreneurship, technology, mobility, wireless, intelligent buildings, online media and more.
PK has served in numerous leadership capacities including as Trustee on the Global Board of TiE, President of TiE Dubai, Founder of The Assembly, Founder of SmartStart Fund, Senior Advisor to Dubai Future Foundation, CEO of Optimistix Ventures, Steering Committee Member of in5 Innovation Hub. He is very closely connected with the latest in technology and innovation around the world, with very close association with innovation powerhouses like MIT Media Labs, Silicon Valley giants, TED, Leading Venture Firms and Technology Clusters around the world
Rajan Raghavan is CEO and co-founder of The Fabric, a startup co-creation foundry, and accelerator. He actively collaborates with entrepreneurs to help create and launch companies in the cloud and network infrastructure space.
At The Fabric, where along with Fabric team and entrepreneurs, Rajan has co-created 12 portfolio companies, of which 3 have been acquired (VeloCloud by VMware, Perspica by Cisco, Appcito by A10 Networks).
Prior to The Fabric, Rajan has been an entrepreneur for over three decades and has founded several companies, including Ankeena Networks (acquired by Juniper), Mediaway, Virtual Chips (acquired by Phoenix Technologies), RealChip Communications, Xambala (acquired by Final, Israel). He is also the founding advisor and on the board of FrontdeskAI.
Rajan currently serves on the boards of companies in the cloud, IoT, and network infrastructure: IoTium, Spanugo, Mesh7, OpsCruise, Cloudbrink, Copperwire.
Based in the Silicon Valley, Dilip often works with professionals, from those just launching their careers, to start-up entrepreneurs, C-level executives, and business owners to coach them to be effective in their pursuits and in their leadership. His clients from 23 countries are diverse: From entrepreneurs, physicians, movie stars, to technology professionals. His previous careers include heading an engineering organization in a Fortune-100 high-tech company, working as a technology consultant, as a marketing consultant, and as a leadership-effectiveness coach.
Dilip has authored five books and has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Chief Executive, and other publications. His weekly career thoughts appear on his website, on LinkedIn, and in widely syndicated 500+ blogs by other publishers, enjoying wide readership. He also holds two technology patents. Dilip holds degrees from IIT-B and Stanford"
Nat founded eFORCE Global Inc. in 1999 and served as its Chief Executive Officer and President. He served as Senior Vice President of Sales at CA Technologies. Nat has over 10 years experience in delivering enterprise solutions to global organizations such as Fleet Bank, Fidelity Investments, Bank of America, ING Bank, Barclays Bank, Mellon Bank, Visa, John Hancock Insurance, and NationsBank. He served as Vice President and General Manager of the Financial Services Division at Siebel Systems (now Oracle). He also held technical, marketing, sales, and general management positions at Scopus Technology, IA Corp., and TRW Financial Systems(now CSC Financial Services), Alysis Technologies (now CSC Financial Services) and Wang Labs.
He has an extensive background in financial services and enterprise software. He was part of the management team at an early CRM software pioneer company acquired by Oracle. He managed Oracle's financial division after the acquisition. He serves as Director of eFORCE Global Inc. Mr. Natraj served as a Member of the Advisory Board of GlobalLogic, Inc. since May 2008.
Sanjit has over a decade of Exec leadership experience in Product Design, Business Development and Strategy across several domains: Big Data, Natural Language Processing, 3D Camera/Apps, Supply-Chain Analytics and Flash Memory. He has managed $2Bill/year accounts and executed >30 partnership deals in $100M-$2Bill range. Always striving to be ahead of the curve, Sanjit worked on Big Data Analytics before industry created the term 'Big Data'. Similarly, he launched 2 online courses during graduate school in 1999 and published iconic papers on learnings, way before the MOOC revolution started.
Sundar is currently a founding member of a blockchain startup and is driving efforts to harness this emerging technology to benefit enterprises and advance Web 3. He is primarily focused on driving Product Strategy, Client/Partner Engagement, and managing global cross-team dependencies to scale up startups. He has proven ability to foster productive partnerships across all levels of an organization, motivate & mobilize diverse global technology teams, and develop collaborative solutions. He has led key company priorities, such as capital raising, financials, product definitions, and go-to-market strategies.
Sundar has also held leadership roles in the Fintech domain and in early-stage ventures. Additionally, he advises startups across various industries and geographies.
A visionary leader and a serial entrepreneur, Lena leads the healthcare & life sciences strategy and business operations for Healthcare Triangle (HCTI). Lena has taken the cloud company from bootstrapped stage to IPO on NASDAQ. He is currently the Executive Sponsor for strategic partnerships, M&As, and oversees some of the key strategic alliances.
Lena is one of the original founders of SAML 2.0 protocol and Federated Identity Management model for the industry while at Orange-France Telecom, which changed the way identity information is shared between service providers and enabled the huge success of SaaS, Cloud and Social Networking.
Lena brings experience and thought leadership in cloud, mobile, cyber security, AI and data from private and public sectors. He is an advisor and angel investor in various startups. Lena is a regular invited speaker in various industry related and entrepreneurship conferences.
Kumar Sripadam is a technology entrepreneur, business consultant, investor, and a mentor with more than 30 years of experience. Kumar was a founding member of Redback Networks, a hugely successful IPO company. He has held several senior and executive positions in various startups.
Kumar is an executive board member of Arc Angel Fund, NYC. He is involved with several venture and angel Funds. He served on the boards of Incentive Logic and MetaCert. He is an advisor at Moesif and True Lark. As an active investor he has invested in more than 70 companies with many successful exits. He is also a mentor and an advisor at many Silicon Valley accelerators and incubators.
Praveer is the President of Engineering, Product, and Operations at Guardhat. Prior to Guardhat, Praveer was one of the co-founders at Finxera (formerly BancBox) where he led product, engineering, and technical operations aspects of the company. Praveer is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in building and operationalizing scalable and modular products across FinTech, Internet Advertising (email and display) and Industrial Tech domains and generating about $500M in company exits.
Hasan Khan is a serial entrepreneur with a decade of experience in building venture-backed startups. As the CTO at Cadonical, he is bringing the agility of software development to hardware development. Earlier, he was the co-founder & CTO at RED where he built the first generative AI tools for the manufacturing industry.
Hasan is a mentor at NEC X and part of the Alchemist Accelerator's selection panel. He also leads the Product-Led Growth working group at Alchemist. He's an advisor and investor in two startups in the AI and devtools spaces.
BV Jagadeesh is Managing Partner at KAAJ Ventures. He has successfully invested and guided companies such as Nutanix (IPO), Yodlee (IPO), Arkin (acqd: VMWare), Elastic Box (acqd: Century Link), NetMagic Solutions (acqd: NTT), Ocarina Networks (acqd: Dell) and Ankeena (acqd: Juniper) to name a few.
Before founding KAAJ, BV Jagadeesh served as a founding investor and CEO of NetScaler. NetScaler pioneered the concept of Application Delivery and was successfully sold to Citrix for $325M and served as Group VP and GM for Citrix's Application Networking division. Prior to Netscaler, he co-founded and served as CTO of Exodus communications in 1993 that pioneered the concept of Internet data centers. He was instrumental in the successful IPO of Exodus in 1998.
Currently Jagadeesh is an active investor and serves on the board of several SiliconValley StartUPs. He is also an adjunct faculty at the Leavey School of Business, SCU.
has built an organization with extensive knowledge of the ICT industry. In 2015, Kanchana formed
Avion Networks, Inc. a JV with Tech Mahindra. The joint venture aims to play a significant role in the
final deployment and management of current mobile networks and their planned transformation into
the next-generation cloud enabled, virtual and software driven networks.
Kanchana chairs several board positions. Telecom Industry Association -TIA, Emory University, TiE-
Atlanta, ATT Women's forum, Georgia Women's Business Council.
Kanchana holds an MBA from Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Executive training from
Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University, and Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth to
augment her broad experience in telecommunications and technology, which spans over 20 years.
Software, Cloud, SaaS, Security, Storage, AI, Pharmaceuticals, Analytics, Machine Learning and
Wearables in multiple legal subject areas for Start-Ups, including Formation, Corporate Governance,
Licensing, Securities, Stock Option Plans, Executive Compensation, Financings, M&A, Privacy, Strategic
Business Development and Sales. Tina brings her experience as a former Partner at a large national law
firm, Board Member, VC Advisor, Start-Up Teacher, Mentor and Author to first time CEOs, Board
Members, and Venture Investors. Tina is admitted to practice law in both California and Washington
D.C.
Monishi Sanyal, is a 1970 graduate of IIT Madras in Mechanical Engineering and the recipient of the Governor's Gold Medal.
He has been a Corporate Executive as well as a Serial Entrepreneur, Investor and Mentor both in India (from 1970 to 1989) and in the US (from 1990 onwards) as a consequence he brings with him extensive cross border experience.
Significant among Monishi's contributions are his Non-Profit work such as:
- 2003: Chairman of the Pan IIT Alumni Association founding team which has now become a 450,000+ global organization and growing.
- 2014 to 2018: Monishi was an Member & Advisor to IIT Madras Research Park (India's first Research Park) and evangelized the capabilities of the IITMRP and their vast high quality talent pool to the high tech industry in the USA and most notably in Silicon Valley.
- 2018: Founding IIT Startups, a 501c3 non-profit Accelerator which helps Startups with at least one IIT co-founder.
- 2018: It started in Silicon Valley with 200 Startups of which 120 have been graduated, 90+ have been funded and 9 have been acquired.
- 2021: The Indian operation launched with a load factor of 3000+ Startups where we have a critical shortage of Mentors. Our focus here is to scale the Mentor Pool to match the needs of the Startups.
- India is the 3rd largest Startup eco-system in the world after US and China and IITs are the 3rd largest Unicorn generators in the world after Stanford and Harvard.
Our goal is to reach #1 and repay the taxpayers of India for the heavily subsidized education we received through the wealth our Startups create.
Track Chairs
Accomplished product & technology engineering executive & experience in leadership roles at Private Cloud company, Computing & Storage Infrastructure Companies and Startups in Silicon Valley. A senior engineering product and technology leader with a proven track record of driving Cloud & Computing infrastructure directions and corresponding products and technology programs at SAP, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard. Some of these technologies have set industry directions, generated revenues in billions of dollars and contributed significantly to financial success of SAP, Sun & Hewlett-Packard. Some of the key products were SAP Private Cloud: Compute, Storage, Cloud Software, Conversational AI Software; SUN: Servers, Workstations, Operating System, Networking, Security products and Systems Engineering; Hewlett-Packard: Operating Systems and Systems Engineering. Additional experience includes leading a top-tier startup as a CEO in the field of data center automation and service provisioning platform and providing high-end consulting with tier 1 high-tech companies in the areas of computing, storage and cloud network services. Some of the clients were: Cisco, Huawei, BMC, startups.
Deepak is a Distinguised Alumnus of IIT Kanpur. He has been a TiE charter member for over 20 years, was on the board of TiE SV chapter, co-founded the TiE Mentor Connect and the TiE Angels programs.