‘India is emerging as a startup hub’

BENGALURU: is the chief executive officer.

They have to be CEOS who have a chance to become a world-class CEO but aren’t yet because their companies are just starting to grow. Somebody who wants to be coached and I’m more of a strategic partner with these companies. They can use my experience. The third thing I look for…i’m always customer-driven. All the companies I acquired at Cisco, the customers told me to do it. So, I really listen to customers’ view and look at what the opportunity overall is.

Then I see if they’re really close to an inflection point, and whether they can be the number one or two player and I’m really interested in number one, with more than 40% market share on it.

Then I look at the make-up of their team and their board.

How many companies have you backed so far? What kind of work are they doing?

Eighteen, about $100 million invested, all personal money. These companies are heavily into the transition—so around cloud, a large amount in security companies and security. The focus on customer experience is huge.

Which Indian companies have you invested in? What do you think about the startup ecosystem here?

There is Uniphore (speech recognition solutions firm); it was a very small startup with customers primarily here in India. Now, it is valued at $145 million, the prediction is that they’ll be a unicorn within 18 months. Their second major centre of excellence will be in the US. One that’s about two years behind is Lucideus (a cybersecurity firm). What is exciting is, almost all my startups are coming to India for their second location. Sprinklr is a top company, a unicorn, on social media and customer experience management. I was talking to them recently on establishing a huge centre of excellence here. You see Rubrik’s doing it, several others will follow shortly. India is becoming a startup hub, not just for startups, but also American firms wanting to have their second centre here. Not big companies, but the startups and that’s where the job growth occurs.

BENGALURU: The benchmark S&P 500 index hit a record high on Monday as a possible trade deal between the US and China, and rising bets on a third rate cut by the Federal Reserve, bolstered investor optimism.

Meanwhile, shares of Microsoft Corp. powered the three main stock indexes. The tech firm’s shares touched an all-time high and were last up 2.6% after it won the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract, beating Amazon.com Inc. Amazon shares dropped nearly 1%. The other two major indexes were less than 1% below their record levels. US President Donald Trump said on Monday he expected to sign a significant part of the trade deal with China ahead of schedule but did not elaborate on the timing.

“Markets seem convinced the first deal will get done and that negotiations are progressing on the next deal,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda.

The news comes as a relief to investors who have been grappling with the fallout from the trade war, which was reflected in some of the dismal economic data this month. This has raised odds for a quarter percentage point cut in US borrowing costs to 94% from 49% last month. The Fed will announce its policy decision at the end of its two-day meeting on Wednesday.