Kanwal Rekhi joins host Milan Vaishnav for a conversation about his new memoir, The Groundbreaker: Entrepreneurship, the American Dream, and the Rise of Modern India, which traces his remarkable journey from a modest upbringing in India to becoming one of the most influential figures in the Indian diaspora in the United States.
Over the past several decades, the story of Silicon Valley has been deeply intertwined with the story of Indian immigrants—engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors who helped shape the technology revolution while building new bridges between the United States and India.
Few individuals embody that journey as vividly Kanwal Rekhi. Rekhi was the first Indian-American founder & CEO to take a venture-backed company public on the NASDAQ. He also co-founded and built The Indus Entrepreneurs—or TiE—into the largest global network of Indian entrepreneurs, and cofounded Inventus—where he is building the venture franchise into a catalyst for India’s tech revolution.
He writes about his life in his new memoir, The Groundbreaker: Entrepreneurship, the American Dream, and the Rise of Modern India, which traces his remarkable journey from a modest upbringing in India to becoming one of the most influential figures in the Indian diaspora in the United States.
To talk more about his book, Kanwal joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss his lifelong passion for entrepreneurship, his modest upbringing and challenging early family life, and his role in building the modern Internet. Plus, the two discuss Kanwal’s role in India’s landmark telecommunications reforms and his recent efforts to boost entrepreneurs in India.
Episode notes:
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Milan Vaishnav Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. Over the past several decades, the story of Silicon Valley has been deeply intertwined with the story Indian immigrants—engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors who helped shape the technology revolution while building new bridges between the United States and India. Few individuals embody that journey as vividly as Kanwal Rekhi. Rekhi was the first Indian-American founder and CEO to take a venture-backed company public on the NASDAQ. He also co-founded and built The Indus Entrepreneurs, or TIE, into the largest global network of Indian entrepreneurs and co- founded Inventus, where he is building the venture franchise into a catalyst for India's tech revolution. He writes about his life in his new memoir, The Groundbreaker, which traces his remarkable journey from a modest upbringing in India to becoming one of the most influential figures in the Indian diaspora in the United States. To talk more about his book, I'm pleased to welcome Kanwal Rekhi to the podcast for the very first time. Kanwal, thank you so much for joining us today and congrats on the book.
Kanwal Rekhi Well, thank you, Miran, for having me for this show. And, you know, hopefully you liked the book, right?
Milan Vaishnav I really enjoyed the book, and having read about you for a long time, it was nice to actually read you reflecting on some of your life's lessons, and in fact, that's where I want to start this conversation. Early on in the book, you talk a little bit about your, I would call it almost a magnetic attraction to entrepreneurship, and you have this line where you write, “The world has problems. Entrepreneurs have solutions. For those of us with this personality type, it's not a choice, it's who we are.” I want to ask you, when did you first realize that being an entrepreneur, having this, kind of, in your blood was simply who you are?
Kanwal Rekhi Well, so, yeah, let's say by mid ‘70s, I was sure I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Yeah. Having been in the Valley here, I got to the Valley in 1971, you know, and was still Santa Clara Valley, not the Silicon Valley, you know, the word Silicon Valley didn't happen until ‘74. Yeah, you are seeing people around you who were becoming entrepreneurs. And some of the people I knew were becoming entrepreneurs. And by that time, I started to realize this entrepreneurship is the ultimate self-realization. You think you're good, you think you are better than most, then this is what you have to do to prove it. So, by ‘78, ‘79, I was sure I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Milan Vaishnav You know, you have this really fascinating upbringing, and I want to talk a little bit about your youth, but I want to actually first start by asking about your college days. Reflecting on your college life, you talk about your 50th reunion at IIT Bombay where you went to college, and you write at that reunion, everyone had heard of you, but almost nobody remembered you, and that was a really striking line. Why do you say that? What were you like during your student days where years later, people had heard of you, but no one really remembered you from your time on campus?
Kanwal Rekhi So I arrived to IIT Bombay in 1963 and didn't speak a word of English. I had never spoken English. I could read and write for sure. That's what most of the Indians do, did at the time for sure, and it's not like I had low self-esteem because of my upbringing, because my father kept telling me all my life that I wouldn't amount to much. And I had to, outward you know physique I was, you know, not an athletic type. And so, you know, I sort of kept my mouth shut and stayed in the back, you know, try to blend in here and not stand out. So, I was very unremarkable you know from that perspective as a person you know here are people you know the Indians were down to dunes to you know Brandy went to the show. We are down to Mount Abu. These are pretty fancy schools, right? They sport very polished English. They are singing English songs. They are doing dancing. They are into drama. And here I am trying to fit in, right? But I had my own way it mattered, the classes, the math, the sciences. Yeah, there was nobody better.
Milan Vaishnav You know, you talk about with a kind of bracing honesty about this difficult relationship you had with your dad. And as you just mentioned, your father sort of wrote you off early in life. He was a military man. You had very different interests, which he didn't always understand. And you write in the book that, look, on the one hand, this was obviously really painful. But you say, on the other hand, it also freed you up from expectations and kind of allowed you to do your own thing, to find your own path. You know, how did this difficult upbringing, how did that shape the way you approached risk and approached ambition kind of later on in your life?
Kanwal Rekhi So let me give you some background. So, my father was only about 32, 33 at the time of partition. He had four children at the time of the partition. And he had a father, his father, who was sort of partially paralyzed, half the body's paralyzed. His mother, he had three sisters and three brothers, you know, and his wife--that's the family he was taking care of. Very large family, very large family. And when we came from Pakistan, he also brought the extended family. You know, the families of his other brothers and his father's brothers. So he was, yes, you know, when I reflected back, he was overburdened. He didn’t worry about the individual, you know, but the clan as a whole. So, I was the one who sort of, you know, was the weakest, you know, runt of the litter, right? And so, you know, I don't remember him being sort of mean-spirited. I saw him more frustrated, you know. Yeah, here I am and he doesn't know what's going to happen to me. India was not a land of opportunity back then. The [government] job, and that's it. And [government] jobs required a perfect physique. Competition was really harsh, right? And so, from that perspective, he didn't see me becoming an army officer, which was about half the government jobs at the time. And he definitely didn't see me becoming an IAS officer. And so if he didn't become those two, he couldn't imagine what would happen to you. On the other hand, I was very good in math. Even from the start, I sort of mentored my brothers and sisters in their math problems, teaching them how to write by-situ. So, I was gaining confidence as an individual and my father left me alone. Yeah, it was sort of, that yeah, I was free to do whatever I wanted to do.
Milan Vaishnav And when you went to your parents to say, look, I'm done with IIT Bombay, I want to study in the United States, you had applied, gained admission to Michigan Tech, you wanted to be an engineer, you knew that much, what was their reaction?
Kanwal Rekhi Well, going to IIT was to become an engineer, right? And I know, when I got into IIT, my father, for the first time, realized that that was a very big deal because his commanding officer's son was not able to get into IIT, right?
Milan Vaishnav Right, he didn't know it was a big deal until he talked to his commanding officer who said, oh wow, your son got into IIT Bombay? My son couldn't get in.
Kanwal Rekhi Yeah, because as a matter of fact, none of his brother officers knew of me as a person because my father was not advertising me as one of his sons. So, they knew my other brothers who went to military academies, my eldest brother, but none of them knew that I was his son until he mentioned that one. And all of a sudden, I went from being nobody to being a hero, because I was the only person in that whole area, all the officers' sons who got into IIT. So, for the first time, my father felt very proud. But by the way, he was his he went to army as a jawan, as a G.I., right? He came back as a Subedar from the war in 1945-47. Subedar is an NCO, and at the time of independence, he got pulled into the officer branch as a Subedar lieutenant because the British were leaving and there was a vacuum. So, he was an older officer, his commanding officer was younger than him in age. So, he also had a complex himself. He looked up to all these officers. I think they were very polished. My father didn't have the tallest education. He had a 10th grade education. And he got pulled into becoming an officer. So, in some fashion, it was a very big deal for him when he became an officer, and acknowledged me as great.
Milan Vaishnav And this idea about going to the United States, I mean, you had seen as a child, I believe, an exhibition by the U.S. Information Agency, an agency that doesn't exist anymore. And it was about how great America was and being the land of progress, and it was kind part of that typical Cold War-era propaganda. But there was a sign that, you know, kind of pointed at you saying, you know, we want you on your side, on our side. Uncle Sam has a place for you. And that really resonated with you. What was it about going to America that grabbed you? And how did your father, how did your mother, how did they take that in?
Kanwal Rekhi So in [the] fifties, you know, U.S. and Soviet Union competed for the heart and soul of Indians. You know, yeah, I mean, they will have exhibitions, you know, they had magazines, they had radio shows. And, you know, so there was this show called Atom for Peace, you know, by the, I think by the USA. And we start about how America was technically advanced and was sharing its knowledge and things with other people. And he was always looking for more engineers and more scientists to come to America. And so here I finished at IIT. There are not many jobs in India at the time. This is the problem with the planning. They planned all these industries, and they planned all these IITs, but they didn't make sure the IITs would have jobs in those industries. And there wasn't much design work, much technical work being done. And then, of course, the US is starting to issue this message that we want you here in America. And I tell people, when I applied for the visa in 1967, I got the visa right away. But then right after I got the visa, I got an invitation to, you know, to come to Delhi, all expenses paid by the U.S. Embassy for an orientation: What to expect in America. You cannot even imagine that anymore. An all expenses paid trip to Delhi. You know, for orientation, right? So, U.S. was very welcoming. I mean, very much asked us to come. And then of course, yeah, we had no alternate opportunity, right?
Milan Vaishnav I want to jump forward a little bit to the story of how you met Anne, your late wife, because it's almost unbelievable. I mean, it should have been turned into a Bollywood or Hollywood movie. Maybe your son Ben is a filmmaker. Maybe he's going to work on that. But I just want to read a quote from the book where you're referencing your friend Umesh, and you say, “Before Umesh and I had left India for Michigan Tech, one of our IIT friends had given me a cheap silver bracelet and asked me to mail it to an American girl with whom he was pen pals.” You did that, and then you went on to say, “what I purposely did not mention, at least for a couple of months, was that this girl had sent me a thank you note, and from there we'd begun exchanging letters with each other.” And you know, one fine day, you and Anne would end up getting married. I mean, tell us about how this unfolded.
Kanwal Rekhi So, I mean, that's exactly how it unfolded. And by the way, you know, had this household, you know, it was sort of somewhat dysfunctional. Our parents were sort of drunkards, alcoholics, both. And yeah, so she was a very much a lonely person. She had a brother and a sister. At the age of seven, she was managing her household. Her parents were always drunk, right? She would be the one who would feed everybody. So, by the time she was a teenager, she was also looking to escape all that. So, she went to New York World Fair, she tried to make pen pals all over. And also, she joined the Air Force as a troops man, as a nurse. So, when I sent her that, doodad, she said, thank you for smuggling that in, yeah and I said, I didn't smuggle that in. So, it started like that. Yeah, there was no expectation beyond anything, but the latter step during back and forth, for three, four years. And then eventually, because that friend in India who had sent that jewelry and she had stopped writing to each other after she started writing to me. I was in New Jersey, you know, with a job, my first job back in 1989. You know, she wanted to come and visit. New York is not too far from there. But meanwhile, I was laid off and I had moved to Florida.
Milan Vaishnav Fort Lauderdale, I think.
Kanwal Rekhi Yeah, Fort Lauderdale. And so, she said she's coming to New Jersey. I said, no, I am in Fort Lauderdale now. And then she said, oh, I much rather come to Fort Lauderdale anyway.
Milan Vaishnav Who wouldn't want to go to Fort Lauderdale as opposed to New Jersey?
Kanwal Rekhi Yeah, it was and still is a very beautiful place, nice beaches, nice weather. So, she came to visit and it was sort of almost love at first sight for both of us. We felt very comfortable with each other and so enough for me to say, hey, why don't we get married? I was feeling a lot of pressure from home to come back to India, you know, to get married.
Milan Vaishnav Well, in fact, you talk about this funny exchange where you sort of tell her that you'd like to get married and she's not quite sure. And then you say, well, look, if you don't say yes, if I go home, my parents are going to marry me off. And she said, no, no, no, I don't want that to happen. And eventually, you did get married. And then, you said, you know, it was a bit, your family had not met Anne, and you went to Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh in 1973. And it had been, I think, about 10 years or so since you'd actually ever lived in Kanpur. And you said at that point, you know, your family had made peace with the fact that you had married this non-Indian woman. And in fact, your father, with whom you had this difficult relationship with, the moment that Anne, your wife, walked into the door, he also kind of had a love at first sight, right? I mean, he also took to her immediately.
Kanwal Rekhi Both my mom and my dad. My mom didn't speak any English at all. She never spoke English, and my dad did. I didn't mention in the book, Anne and I used to have very simple names for each other, she would me Brownie and I would call her Whitey. You know, yeah, it was, you know, very loving [in that] way [that] I'm saying. So, my dad really, yeah…I like that exchange, you know.
Milan Vaishnav He liked the Brownie-Whitey exchange.
Kanwal Rekhi Yeah. And the, yeah, Anne was an easy-going person. She, you know, she fitted very quickly in. She accepted everybody, everybody accepted her. Yeah. So, even though my father was not too happy when I had written to him that I was married there—because in India, this notion of, you know, marrying a foreigner is not very acceptable, right?
Milan Vaishnav Sure
Kanwal Rekhi And this is now, yeah. I got married in 1971, and we were there two years later, in 1973. And by that time, I'm starting to feel very confident as an individual, partly because Anne married me, and my job was very stable, and I was starting to do very, very well at the job. And I mentioned in the book that my company was afraid that I may not come back, so they sent me a telegram saying that they are giving me a 20% raise while I'm on vacation. And then a second telegram, a few days later, that they will pick up the expenses for the trip also. So it was, yeah, sort of, I'm starting to now gain a lot of confidence as an individual.
Milan Vaishnav You know, I think, oftentimes when you see successful people who have done well in business like you and entrepreneurship, when you're looking at that person from the outside, it's sometimes hard to see the setbacks and the failures. And one thing I really appreciate about your book is you're very honest about the setbacks. I mean, there are multiple times when you were laid off. There were times at different companies where you felt you should have been in charge. The leadership, the board had different ideas. They brought in a different CEO. You had to make your peace with that. In some cases, eventually they came to their senses and made you the CEO. In other cases, you kind of had to suffer along. But I want to ask you about, there was a pivotal moment in your life when you were working at a firm called Singer-Link and that firm was doing a lot of work with the Pentagon at the time. And you were looking at the newspaper, and you saw a headline which was about a colleague, a former colleague of yours, at Singer named David Jackson. And you say in the book that when you saw that headline, it was like a eureka moment for you. It was a moment that ultimately pushed you towards starting your own business. Why did that story about this ex-colleague, David Jackson, have such a profound effect on you?
Kanwal Rekhi So, Singer-Link did the flight simulators for US Air Force, US Navy, NASA. It was a very good job, and I had been established as a senior system engineer with a reputation of being just about the best. You know, but job had become sort of, you know, little bit stagnant, you know. I mentioned also in the book, I wasn't doing promotions into management ranks. I was doing these promotions, pseudo-promotions: engineers, senior engineers, staff engineers, senior staff engineers. Yeah, they were making all these titles up for me. Yeah, salary was very good. And it became very clear that I was not going to be termed. Getting the management grants and eventually, you know, that's what you need to do to move up the company ladder, right? David Jackson was an immigrant from England. He had come to the U.S. and he had worked for me for two, three years. He was reasonably good, but he wasn't top notch. And he left to do a startup. This is now ’79-‘80. Yeah, microprocessors are happening. We are doing a bit enough. Z80 was a microprocessor from Xilod, which was seen as a very good processor. All the early machines, the business machines, were built around Z80. And there was this language called CPM. So, he did the earliest hotbots on Z80 and CPM, all those computers. You know, this is way back then. And also, I realized, David Jackson, had the courage to leave the job and become an entrepreneur. And here I'm stuck at this job, and with no prospect of moving up. What's the matter with me? Why can't I be like David Jackson? Why can…I have I knew for sure I was 10 times better than David. In every respect, in terms of technology, in terms of, you know, you have things that I was doing. If David can do it…You see, this is the point I have learned over the years was, was somebody, who knocked me out of my comfort zone. You know, I couldn't blame anybody. I couldn't blame anybody for not giving me promotions. I said, why can't I become an entrepreneur like David has become? Why can’t I leave my job? And that's when I realized that you start at any job because you need the paycheck, you need to pay your mortgage, you need to pay your bills. And yeah, so then, that’s what's holding you back, not the company management. So being not out of your comfort zone, being out of the comfort zone is the starting point of becoming an entrepreneur.
Milan Vaishnav I want to ask you about that jump into entrepreneurship. I mean, you would go on to found this company with some of your friends called Exelon, and it was a pivotal company in that era of Silicon Valley, and there's a famous scene in the book where you and your friends, you in particular, are essentially writing the business plan for this company on a napkin at a pizza parlor where you guys are having pizza and beer. I want to ask you just to take a little bit of a side here. The company specialized in really developing this TCP-IP protocol and ordinary lay people like myself have no idea what this means, but we've seen on our computers, you know, these initials TCP/IP. It was a protocol that had been developed by DARPA. And as you write it, you say... If the ethernet was the highway that connected one computer to another, TC/IP was the vehicle that transported packages of information along this road, making sure there were no stalls or crashes along this way. What did you see or understand at that moment about the future of the internet and technology that other people failed to recognize?
Kanwal Rekhi So, the backdrop is that by 1981, IBM PC was announced as a personal desktop computer. We already had the mainframes, and we had these hot boxes being produced like the Altos. There were multiple hot boxes being produced with units. Yeah, and then of course, there were many computers and from digital and others. So, all of a sudden, you know, the light bulb went up, hey, these hotboxes machines will have to interact with each other. Some of you don't have to connect them on a network. So that was the thing I did on the napkin. We had to do the networking for all these machines. And so, networking has this hardware underneath that you need to connect using wire computer to each other. But the wire itself is not enough. That just provides the connectivity. Somebody's going to have to take the data, break that down into things and transmit to the other machine, and make sure you dot their library. So, you need protocols. Ethernet as a hardware standard was announced by digital, Intel, and Xerox around the same time IBM PC was announced. So those two things quickly clicked in my head. I can do Ethernet very quickly using available off-the-shelf chips. And when were looking around, how do we implement these protocols, there were several protocols being proposed. IBM had their own. Digital sad their own. And there was this ISO standard being proposed by the government and big companies worldwide. And then there was this protocol used by the ARPA to connect universities at the time, initially UCLA, Oxford, Princeton, and Berkeley. And they were in public domain. And the TCP/IP was especially designed to connect disparate machines. Because that's what the RB needed, the DOD needed. And so, it was a working protocol, but it was designed for slow long-haul telephone networks. It was designed for error-prone networks, which were slow. And here's Ethernet, which is very reliable and very fast. So, they were not seen as a mass pair. You know, you know Ethernet needs new streamlined protocols, you know that Xerox was proposing. But the problem was there was…none of them has applications. We should connect disparate machines and I one day I said, you know, if I put TCP/IP on Ethernet, I have a solution that people can connect disparate machines right away. If the underlying network is reliable and the underlying network is fast, it shouldn't invoke those error routines. They are there in TCP/IP to make sure that they are retrieved from their mistakes and errors. It should be fast, it should be pretty fast. Nobody believed it except me. And when I did put it out, it was pretty fast, so it was instantly working solution. All of a sudden, I could offer people connectivity between their disparate machines. They could do file transfers. They could things they couldn't even imagine before.
Milan Vaishnav Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I mean that essentially, you know, you helped commercialize ethernet TCP/IP technologies, recognizing the potential of this for local area networks, you know? Despite the fact that you faced a lot of criticism, I think, from people in the industry.
Kanwal Rekhi You know, just to make another point. You know, there are standards, you know, the people love standards, but standards take time to be accepted, you know, to be widely implemented. And the pain point was immediate, you know, people had these, you know, these kinds of machines and they needed to connect. So, when I started to implement, I didn't mention in my early marketing [that] it was TCP/IP and Ethernet, all I said was I could connect your disparate machines and do file transfers. So, I was focused on the pinpoint of: people need to do file transfer and they need to do it now. So, my message was very straightforward. You need to connect these machines, I can do it for you now. I didn't want to put TCP/IP in front and center. You know, that was about two or three years into it, you know, before, you know, I started to use: what is TCP/IP because by that time the others had realized that was the way to go.
Milan Vaishnav In addition to being an entrepreneur yourself, Kanwal, one of the things you've really taken pride in is creating a kind of ecosystem to help other entrepreneurs. You were, as I mentioned at the set-up, one the founders of TIE, The Indus Entrepreneurs. I think it's an organization most of our listeners would have heard of. This has since become a major global network supporting entrepreneurs around the world. When you started that organization, did you realize the kind of impact that it would have over the long run, or was this just kind of an experiment? You thought, let's do this and maybe it fails, or did you really understand that this was going to have a long run payoff?
Kanwal Rekhi No, no, we did not have any, you know, big ambitions. So, what happened, 1991, you know, India liberalizes. And this bureaucrat comes in and tells, yeah we ought to do things in India, you know, in India is changing. And I'm now sort of living in a world, I've been happy to please being public and, but I'm also sorry to feel: what's next in my life? And so, when this group started to meet, after this, we had lunch with this bureaucrat and that was the first time we met. Yeah, seven, eight of us, yeah. All of a sudden, we discovered each other. Yeah, Suhas Patil, myself, Kailash Joshi, and somebody said, that was fun. Why don't we meet more often? So, we set up a dinner club once a month, you know, third Wednesday of month, you know. We would all meet for dinner, where we each told our stories. And one thing stood out very quickly, that each one had a very lonely journey, very lonely journey. Each one had this issue of not being, you know, not having any mentor, or nobody you talk to. And from there, the idea emerged, you know, we should encourage our people to become entrepreneurs. We should become the mentors. We should become the role models. And so our spotter, I mentioned in the book, mentioned, you shouldn't have been that hard for us. Let's make it easier for the next generation. So that was the idea. And so, we set up a workshop for entrepreneurs in 1993. And we expected maybe, you know, 50 to 100 people will show up for the workshop. You know, we took it pretty lightly. But when, we announced it, 500 people signed up. and I was, oh my God, you cannot do it lightly. Now you have to have a structure. You need to have sessions. You know? You know. So, so we had to very quickly organize and that's, that was the formation of TiE. And, you know, that conference was very well-run and very successful in 1993. I wasn't looking to do anything. I was trying to do my next startup. I was thinking through, what should I do? And all of a sudden, I leave and there's a demand for people coming to me for mentoring sessions, mentoring requests. And since we had the interest and since we said we would do it, I felt very obligated. You know, you can’t inspire people to become entrepreneurs and then say, I don't have time for you. And before I knew it, I was super busy. So, I got pulled in. I got pulled in and, you know, and I started to enjoy it a lot and I see the impact I will have on a person who will walk in there two hours later, you now he's shaking his head and he's walking out and he is doing his startup. In 1995, I must have met a thousand entrepreneurs. I had to hire an admin to…I'm out of nowhere by that time. I had hired an admin to schedule me because there was so much demand in my time. And we had made a rule that ‘thou shall not say no to a young entrepreneur’ in the initial group. And the demand was infinite. I was spending 10, 12 hours a day. And, I was, for the first time, very busy, very happy, and very satisfied in what I was doing. I was seeing the impact almost right away. Yeah, out of that, dozens of companies came, which did very, very well.
Milan Vaishnav You also have played a role, not just in shaping kind of future entrepreneurs, but also influencing policy that the government of India has adopted. And there's just this fascinating passage in the book about the landmark telecommunication reforms. And there was a really interesting backstory. You and others had developed a plan to help transform India's telecom sector. You had-
Kanwal Rekhi No, no, that's not how it happened. So, in 1998, 99, we had the seminar in Bombay and Delhi, and it was titled, “Entrepreneurship and Wealth Creation, Silicon Valley Style.” It was the first time anybody ever talked about entrepreneurship in India. And by the way, Vajpayee becomes prime minister for 13 days. He was prime minister about 13 days, and then he becomes Prime Minister for 13 months. And then he became Prime Minister a third time. And this is the only time we are holding these seminars. So, he gives a speech called, IT is India's tomorrow. I said, oh, yeah, this guy gets it. You know, and remember, this is the time, you know, Y2K problem is happening. You know in India, I need to be, you're solving the saving the world. Right. So I went, I requested to [sic] people to go see prime minister and, and he, you accepted my, you invited me. So, I want to see him. And I said, yeah, prime minister, you think IT is India's tomorrow, then he has to do something because it in India is third rate. Third world. You can't build a modern IT industry on top of that one. And he says, you know, in Hindi, it will be
Milan Vaishnav Tell me what to do.
Kanwal Rekhi What should I do? You know what to do. Tell us what to do. So, I came back to Stanford. Yeah. And I was at Stanford on a part of SIEPR. I don't know if you heard of SIEPR. SIEPR at Stanford.
Milan Vaishnav The Institute of Economic Policy Research.
Kanwal Rekhi Yeah, so I was on the board of SIEPR. So, I proposed to them, hey, we ought to, the Prime Minister has asked me, we ought to do something. And so, we assembled a group of professors. And two of them were telecom Policy Experts. One of them was former FCC Commissioner. And we funded, I funded the effort. They studied 13 telecom liberalizations around the world. And they came up with a simple conclusion that telecom should be open to everybody, should not be a sale of license to operate, should be a revenue share model, where the companies can start and the government gets a revenue shared rather than sells them a license. So, it was a very simple policy, two-page policy. So, I went back to India and I went to see the territory minister and he dismissed me. So, I wrote that op-ed in the Times of India. Yeah. [in Hindi]
Milan Vaishnav Basically, get rid of the telecom department, save the country.
Kanwal Rekhi Evidently. And I was really upset because I had spent two or three million dollars. I had spent a year, and I got dismissed out of hand. You know, he basically told me, you know, mind your own business, you're not Indian and this is something we will never do.
Milan Vaishnav This was in exchange with the then minister of telecom Ram Vilas Paswan, who was, you know,
Kanwal Rekhi Yes, Ram Vilas Paswan. So I wrote that op-ed and I flew back to the U.S. And I got a phone call from the Prime Minister's office.
Milan Vaishnav And this was NK Singh at the time.
Kanwal Rekhi NK Singh at the time and the NTS says, you know a prime minister wants to talk to you. He wants to understand why you wrote such an intemperate op-ed. Can you come in? Yeah, yeah tomorrow or day after And I said I’m back in the U.S He says but prime minister want to see you. So, I flew right back to India. I'm still jet lagged but I flew back to India and went to see the prime minister And so I told him, if he remembered that he had asked me to tell him what to do, he said, yeah, he said I remember. So, I told them what happened. I spent all this time and effort. We came up with the policy, and his minister dismissed it and he said oh, okay, you know, Tita, Sundia, right? And then they dismissed me. And I'm very, very upset, you know, you brought me back for this five-minute session with the prime minister.
Milan Vaishnav And you basically didn't say anything.
Kanwal Rekhi He told me, he did tell you that Sundia, I have heard.
Milan Vaishnav And he's heard you.
Kanwal Rekhi Yeah, and before I left, like two days later, he replaced Ram Vilas Paswan and shifted him to the Ministry of Mines and all that and promoted Mahajan as the Minister of Telecom. And promoted Mahajan, accepted our policy recommendations and announced new policy to be on April 1st, 2001. It was a very simple policy: no license sale, invite all the teleocm companies, 7% revenue share or 8% revenue share and you have to put $10 million up to have a right to open the company and you'll have to start a service within 18 months. If you don't, you have restart the process over. You know, there was a gold rush. Yes, 18, 19 companies came in right away. And yeah, within a year, the telecom thing was on. So, the day the policy went into effect on April 1st, 2001, there were 1 million mobile phones in India, and there were 17 million landlines. A year later, there were 83 million mobile phone, in India and 17 million landlines, and we never looked back, right? So, the government of India didn't spend a dollar. As a matter of fact, the only other requirement they added was every phone company will have to have a lifeline service for the poor people, which was something like 5% of their revenues will have be sector-backed for lifeline services. And within five years after that one, there were 500 million mobile phones in India. So, yeah, to this, I was amazed to see how much impact this one had. And there was no debate. There was no parliament bill. Prime Minister heard it. He told the minister to change the minister. They adopted our recommendations without any change whatsoever. And by the way, the change did come later. They went back to license sale, if you remember, in 2000. Under Tundra's, you know, and then we had that G2, G3 standard right.
Milan Vaishnav At 2G Scam.
Kanwal Rekhi See, once you sell a license, you know, license has a property value, you know, and also, you know, the ministers and the people say, you know, hey, my signature did some, you know, a billion dollars’ worth of property value. What’s the harm of me taking 10%, right?
Milan Vaishnav Right. This is a rent-seeking opportunity.
Kanwal Rekhi That's the opportunity. The revenue share took that away. When you sell a license, the company has to have a license. So, they spend all their capital to buy a license and then they have no money left to implement. That was the insight we had at Stanford. Invite everybody to implement, don't take their capital away, let them use their capital to implement and put pressure on them to implement fast.
Milan Vaishnav You know, you since then have gotten involved in many different ways in terms of trying to boost entrepreneurship in India. You established something called the Kanwal Reiki Rural Entrepreneurship and Startup Center. I believe that's, if I'm not mistaken, based in the state of Telangana. Tell us a little bit about the mission of this initiative and what sorts of entrepreneurs are you hoping that your center can support?
Kanwal Rekhi So before we talk about that one, I should talk about the Entrepreneurship Center at IIT Bombay, SINE, S-I-N-E, Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurships. Back in 2001, around the time telecom policies happened, I had given money to IIT Bombay to set up, you know, that computer science center, right, the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology. So, I proposed at that time to them, you know, they should set up a small incubator to introduce entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay. And they weren't sure, but since I'm paying the money, you know, and they said, sure, you know, so we set up this small room there. And SINE has become a phenomenal such as that IIT Bombay, they have over 500 startups. They have had dozens and dozens of IPOs out of that thing. And this week, as we speak now, there is a IPO happening in India by a startup, by a professor at IIT Bombay. You know, a professor is going to make 1000 crore as his share of the wealth. So, so I had IIT Bombay SINE became a role model for all the IITs, all India. So, the incubators are set up at IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, I it helped, you know, so you have the revolution that you talked about entrepreneurship is happening because of that. You know, it was phenomenal impact. So, then I realized, you know, this is happening in metros and this is happening among the elite. And Sita Prahlad and I used to talk about, by the way, Sita was very engaged with TiE and me. And we used to talk about democratization of entrepreneurship; can we have millions of entrepreneurs? And we used to dream that can we have entrepreneurs in the third and fourth tier cities and in the villages where can we bring the latest technology and overnight transform these things? So about four years ago, I started this. A project in Telangana with Raju Reddy, one of my mentees. He's from Telangana. And we started having, by the way, you should talk to, have you ever talked to "Desh" Deshpande?
Milan Vaishnav No, not for the show, no.
Kanwal Rekhi Or definitely should talk to Deshpande. Deshpande is a phenomenal person out of Boston. He has the sandbox in Karnataka, which has become very transformational. So, we worked with Deshpande to set up the center in Telangana along the lines that he had in Karnataka where young people, yeah. From certain 30-year-cities, they come and become sort of entrepreneurs and trainees. We give them space, we give them the mentoring and they come. So this process is happening and I gave more money here to build the building. That's the announcement. But that center has been on for four years. And I want to tell you this one story. This one kid, one kid from that village, went to one of the regional engineering schools and that is, he's beat at and he went back to his village and very quickly realized that the village was stuck in the stone age, no electricity. And he started to use these solar panels and batteries and electrified the whole village. All of our new villages have electricity. Then he noticed that all the implements they used for farming are really, really primitive. And he started to redesign some of those implements. And very quickly, the income doubled and tripled in his village. His father, his uncles, his neighbors, they all loved it. And the word started to spread. Neighboring villages, can you help us? Can you buy those implements? So this guy is changing the whole area five crores in revenue last year. And 17,000 farmers are using these tools already. That's what I mean. Can we do that more? Can we have these young people go back to their villages and transform them using latest technology and pull them out of stone age? Of course, this latest AI stuff will happen, But that's going to have, that's going to be, not going to help, you know, change India. You need millions and millions of these young entrepreneurs. There's another girl, I want to tell you, she went to IIT Bombay, my alma mater. She took a job with one of those, one of the fast-moving consumer drugs companies in Bombay. Where everybody is selling to India, Bharat, you know, to villages. But none of them has ever been to a village. All these modern people. So, she organized a tour to her village for those, you know, for her office mates. And from there, she came up with an idea. Everybody had good time. You know, everybody loved it. Why don't I start rural tourism? So, she started to work with about 20 villages, you know where they set up the hostels. And they're bringing tourists not from Japan, from France, from America. Last year, 100,000 tourists came to those villages. Now, these villages are making more revenue from that tourism, from anything else. So that's what I mean. Can we have entrepreneurship in these villages by giving these people ideas, tools, inspiring them?
Milan Vaishnav I want to maybe bring this conversation to an end by asking you about, coming full circle a little bit and asking you kind of about Indians living in the United States. When you came to Michigan Tech for graduate school, you did very well on your first exam, but your professor didn't believe you. He essentially accused you of cheating because he couldn't believe that you would have done so well. And when the next test came around, he stood behind you, hovering over. To make sure that you weren't doing anything wrong, but you still did very well. And he said, you know, something is off here, right? So, in the book, you say that, the kind of racism stereotypes about Indian Americans, how they couldn't cut it, this thing that was kind of simply part of life. But you know fast forward, here we are in 2026. We are seeing signs of renewed racism, certainly online against Indian Americans. A lot of criticisms about Indian immigrants, a lot of criticism about the H-1B visa program, and a sense that Indians are in a precarious moment. How do you compare the situation back then to what it looks like right now?
Kanwal Rekhi So, you know, the branding of India in the 60s was very simple, a land of snake charmers and land of beggars. You know, branding of the India is different now, right? Yeah. So, just to give you that story about Michigan Tech. Back in 2001, when I engaged with IIT Bombay, and started to set up that center there, my wife said, you know, you are American. It's great you're worried about India and helping them, but you have to do that here too. You know, so, yeah, and I saw the logic, she mentioned, so I engaged with IIT Bombay also, and I paid for a building there, you know, just like, yeah I paid for the building at IIT, you and they did, yeah. John Mullen and Andrew T. Hall, yeah for computer science at Michigan Tech also. And then I, started to go back to Michigan Tech twice a year to hold, you know, seminars and classes for the students and the professors about entrepreneurship. So all of a sudden, I realized Silicon Valley is not America, you know, Heartland America has the issues also. So, I started to preach, you know, within TiE, we ought to go back to the Heartland and go back to our alma maters and bring the technology startups there. And I did that thing at IIT. You know, there is another professor at IIT Bombay who did it. I mean, Michigan Tech who did a startup, you know, which is just been acquired this week, you are Orbion space technology that I helped start. I helped fund what happened. Our generation was sort of, you know, had to keep your head down, mind your business, you know, you try to fit in, you know, the racism in America was not quite directed at us. They had no image of us, only because they didn't know us. That has changed. Americans are racist, slavery and all that. We can talk about that. But the people who came in the 80s and 90s, they never became Americans. Indian music, Indian food. I know people who have been here 15, 20 years and they don't have one American friend. Yeah. So, you know, you sort of trying to, yeah, I don't want to say it's their fault. Yeah, you're inviting that in. You have to be part of America. Yeah. I lost touch with Bollywood. I lost touch with Indian music. I last touch with it. I am a football fan. When I go to Michigan Tech now, they think I'm God, because I have transformed the whole area, you now, the start-ups happening there. So, we cannot be in America and not be Americans, and so I hear that issue, that I hear that person put up a 50 feet statue of Hanuman in the middle of the town. Why is that necessary? So yeah, of course, yeah, America is very more racist because of Trump, but a matter independence upon us is fairly absolute. Yeah, you know, you have 15% of the doctors are Americans. You have 25% of entrepreneurs are American 25% the
Milan Vaishnav Indian. Sorry, they’re Indian.
Kanwal Rekhi 10 to 12 percent of the professors are Indians, right? There are five million Indians working for the American companies in India. Yeah, there's a racism. There's a racism in America. There has always been racism, and there will always be racism in America, yeah. So, yeah, I have personally not felt since then, My wife was American, my best friend is my brother-in-law, my wife's brother, you know. He saw how his sister, that elevated into this stratosphere, we helped him buy his house. And so you have to be part of America if you're going to be here. You have to participate in politics here, which I did. Both Ro Khanna and Raja Krishnamoorthi, they were my mentees. Yeah, I helped them long before they became a big congressmen.
Milan Vaishnav Well, maybe this is a good way to wrap up. I want to read what Ro Khanna wrote in the foreword to your book. He said, “Kanwal Rekhi’s journey is remarkable, not just on its own, but because it mirrors India's own transformation from a developing nation to a global economic powerhouse driven by the ingenuity and ambition of its people.” He goes on to say, “reading these pages reminded me of why I got into politics to begin with. True leadership isn't about personal ambition, but about serving a greater purpose.” My guest on the show this week is Kanwal Rekhi. He's an entrepreneur and now an author of a new memoir called The Groundbreaker, traces his life from his upbringing in India to being one of the most successful figures in Silicon Valley. Kanwal, thank you so much for joining us and congrats again on the book.
Kanwal Rekhi Thank you, Milan.
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
Facing a convergence of job disruption, wage stagnation, and rising debt, the Indian middle class may no longer be the engine of growth it once was. This is the argument made in a new book titled, Breakpoint: The Crisis of the Middle Class and the Future of Work. It is authored by Saurabh Mukherjea, along with Nandita Rajhansa and Sapana Bhavsar.
Milan Vaishnav, Saurabh Mukherjea, Nandita Rajhansa
On this week’s show, Milan sits down with the novelist Karan Mahajan, author of a much-anticipated new novel, The Complex. Karan is an associate professor in Literary Arts at Brown University and the author of the books Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs.
Milan Vaishnav, Karan Mahajan
The second Trump administration has adopted a more assertive and unpredictable approach to U.S. foreign policy. For India, this evolving context raises several important questions about the viability of its foreign policy approach.
Milan Vaishnav, Shoumitro Chatterjee, Sameer Lalwani, …
Over the past two decades, Washington and New Delhi have drawn steadily closer—driven by shared concerns about China, expanding economic ties, and a growing Indian diaspora in the United States. To help us unpack all of this, this week Milan spoke with Congressman Ami Bera in his office on Capitol Hill.
Milan Vaishnav, Ami Bera
Just weeks ago, India hosted the 2026 AI Impact Summit, the latest chapter in a global process that began in 2023 in the UK. For the Modi government, the summit was part diplomatic showcase, part investment pitch, and part declaration of ambition. To talk more about the summit and its key takeaways, Milan is joined on the show this week by Anirudh Suri, a nonresident scholar with Carnegie India.
Milan Vaishnav, Anirudh Suri
