Tech pioneer discovers a second act in life

 

NEW YORK: Vivek Wadhwa spent years as a thoroughgoing technology entrepreneur building a software outfit called Relativity Technologies which helps modernise legacy computer systems. Then he had a revelation.

 

“I had spent five years running at top speed to build my firm and then I had a massive heart attack in 2002. It was life-changing,” 48-year-old Wadhwa told DNA. “I woke up in the hospital glad to be alive. But I had my investors trying to steal my company.”

 

With Wadhwa in hospital, venture capitalists swooped down on Relativity Technologies to try and convince top management to accept money for a revised agreement that would gift them majority ownership. But they were in for a shock when Wadhwa, still bandaged, walked into the meeting. The rest is history. Wadhwa maintained control over his company; steered it through the dot-com crash and when it was on high ground he decided to listen to his heart.

 

“I recruited a CEO to take over from me and decided that my priority was to make up for lost time with my family,” said Wadhwa. That led him to India where his eldest son, Vineet was taking his semester abroad in New Delhi — the city where Wadhwa was born. “I wanted to get closer to my son who was excited by Bollywood,” said Wadhwa who has now taken a role in the film business.

 

“For 35 years I was nothing but a tech head and later a CEO. Now I am enjoying my adventures in Hollywood and Bollywood. My Bollywood Bride has been completed,” said the entrepreneur-turned-film-producer.

 

If the film succeeds it will push Wadhwa into a growing band of self-made US businessmen who have pushed their way into the movies. This new breed includes eBay’s first president Jeff Skoll who is the producer of Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana and Broadcast.com co-founder Mark Cuban who has produced Bubble. “We are looking for a mainstream distributor in the US,” he said. The film had top European distribution firms in a bidding war. “We’ve sold UK, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, France, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Indonesia. In India, we have multiple options.”

 

With My Bollywood Bride hitting theatre screens Wadhwa has again changed tack. He is now helping the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University steer its Engineering Management program closer to the business world. “My priority is not film now but academia — this is my way of giving back to the education system that has given so much to me,” said Wadhwa who mentors fledgling entrepreneurs.

 

He recently guided a Duke study that dispels fears about outsourcing and asks whether the US is really falling behind India and China in education.  Looking strictly at four-year degrees without considering quality, his study found that in 2004 the US graduated 1,37,437 engineers while India graduated 1,12,000 and China 3,51,537. The study disputes claims that 6,00,000 engineers graduate annually from China, 350,000 from India and 70,000 from the US. Wadhwa said the Duke study found India and China counted students who had taken two-year and three-year programs as engineers while the US stuck to four-year degrees.

 

“The US is graduating enough engineers to sustain R&D in corporate America. As a developing country India will need more engineers to build infrastructure,” predicted Wadhwa. “Indians make up 30 per cent of the class in Duke. The IIT graduates are intellectually at par with anyone in the US but they show a lot of initiative and want to change the world.”

 

Wadhwa has been in the thick of the outsourcing debate. In 1992, he visited Russia and was among the first to hire computer programmers who excelled in math and computer science, skills essential to work on translating old IBM mainframe code to modern computer languages that run on the latest computer platforms.

 

“I couldn’t have built Relativity Technologies without outsourcing the work to brilliant Russian programmers. In 1994, I tried to outsource some of the work to India and we got burnt. But it is amazing how far India has now come,” said Wadhwa.