Gururaj Deshpande is an Indian American businessman and social entrepreneur, who is best known for co-founding the Chelmsford, MA based internet company Sycamore Networks in 1998 and the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT. He is also founder of the Deshpande Foundation.
He started his career working at Codex Corporation, a Motorola subsidiary in Ontario, Canada which manufacturers modems, before moving to the U.S. in 1984. Later he co-founded Coral Networks, a router developer, in 1987, he sold the company, two years later for $15 million.
In 1990, Deshpande co-founded Cascade Communications, whose products were very important in the early internet, initially serving as its president and later Executive Vice President, he hired Dan Smith as CEO. He sold Cascade to Ascend Communications for $3.7 billion in 1997. Subsequently, with help of MIT researchers, he launched Sycamore Networks in 1998. Sycamore Networks went public in October 1999, and soon raised a market cap of $18 billion, and his 21% shareholding, briefly made him, one of the richest Indians in the world, and in 2000, he featured on the Forbes 400 listing of Richest Americans.
In 2000, he founded Networking and Telecom equipment products company, Tejas Networks, along with US-based ASG-Omni in Bangalore.
In July 2010, he was appointed as the Co-Chairman of National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a group set up to support US President's innovation strategy.
So to seed this effort in India, we first wanted to make sure that we created a critical mass. The way you create critical mass is by doing a lot of stuff in a smaller area, just like Silicon Valley, Route 128, and so on. So we took an area of about five districts in India, which is a small area, ...(Full transcript available to logged in subscribers.).
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