Vivek Wadhwa clinches “Outstanding American” award

New York: Professor-writer-tech guru, Vivek Wadhwa is the very model of a cosmopolitan Indian American and has the intellectual pedigree for an itinerant world. He received quite an honour this week when the Naturalisation and Immigration Service named him its annual “Outstanding American by Choice” award recipient along with four other entrepreneurs.

Wadhwa, who is never afraid to speak his mind about anything – PC or otherwise, came to the US in 1980 to complete a Master’s degree at New York University. Wadhwa built a software firm called Relativity Technologies (now part of IBM) which was hailed as one of the “coolest” companies in the world by Fortune magazine. Now as the executive in residence in the Pratt School of Engineering, in Duke University, Wadhwa helps students and fledgling entrepreneurs get better acquainted with the business world.

Ever since he became an academic six years ago, Wadhwa has been one of the biggest critics of US competitiveness policies. He has been particularly vocal about America’s flawed immigration policies.

“When I received the call from US Citizenship and Immigration Services director, Alejandro Mayorkas, I had tears in my eyes,” Vivek wrote in a column for The Washington Post.

“He told me that the government appreciated all of my efforts to make the country more competitive and that my criticisms of his department had motivated his team to work harder to improve the system.”

Only in America, Wadhwa noted, would his adopted home bestow upon him such an honour despite his vocal criticism. He said in America, dissent is rewarded, and it’s what gives America its innovation edge.

“I quantified the amazing contribution that skilled immigrants make in the technology industry and raised the alarm about the reverse brain drain that is in progress. I testified, assertively, to Congress, and have been badgering our political leaders,” Wadhwa wrote in The Post.

“My father, a retired Indian diplomat, called me on several occasions to plead that I tone down my criticism. He worried that I would anger US government officials and they would find some way to have me deported. Indeed, this would have been the case in many countries, where I could have ended up in a Gulag — or worse,” he added.

Wadhwa recently riled venture capitalists and those who sign big checks by uttering the unspeakable: the dice is heavily loaded against women and African Americans in Silicon Valley. A CNN documentary captures Wadhwa, a mentor to black tech entrepreneurs in the new startup accelerator NewMe, encouraging minorities to find a white man to front their companies. Naturally, the venture capitalists (mostly white men) were stung to have their biases exposed.

“If there is some kind of digital dogfight in Silicon Valley, chances are that Vivek Wadhwa is smack in the middle of it,” wrote columnist Chris O’Brien.

“Name a controversial subject: immigration, investment bubbles, age discrimination, women and minorities in tech, Google’s search results. Wadhwa, the most provocative voice in Silicon Valley, has likely staked out a controversial position that has everyone in Silicon Valley taking sides. And his penchant for straight talk and challenging the conventional wisdom about the Valley being a meritocracy has catapulted him to national prominence,” added O’Brien.

Wadhwa’s straight-talk and incisive data-driven studies have made him a media darling and sought-after by US universities.

“He tells it as he sees it,” Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of Singularity University, the school focused on the future impact of technology, who helped recruit Wadhwa to a faculty position there, told Mercury News. “He doesn’t dilly-dally or cherry-coat anything. I have a great deal of respect for him.”

Wadhwa built and led Relativity Technologies which helped modernize legacy computer systems. In 2002, he survived a massive heart attack to get sucked into another sort of battle.

“I woke up in the hospital glad to be alive. But I had my investors trying to steal my company,” Wadhwa once told me.

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; worked 18-hour days and was indisputably in charge. He steered his company through the dot-com crash and when it was on high ground he decided to listen to his heart.

“For 35 years I was nothing but a tech head and later a CEO. That means working all hours, it means very large sacrifices. I recruited a CEO to take over from me and decided that my priority was to make up for lost time with my family and give back to the education system,” said Wadhwa.

Wadhwa dabbled briefly with producing Hollywood-Bollywood films but soon turned to helping students at Duke through the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialisation (CERC), which spurs tech innovation on campus. Wadhwa is also a visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley and senior research associate at Harvard Law School.

Chinese-American Ping Fu, co-founder of a 3-D software visualisation company Geomagic, Cameroon-born Christopher Che, CEO of the Che International Group, Wales-born Michael Moritz, managing member of Sequoia Capital and Iranian Shervin Pishevar, managing director at Menlo Ventures received the “Outstanding American by Choice” award along with Wadhwa.

“When I came to this country I believed I was no one. My journey is the embodiment of the American dream,” said Fu, who arrived with “no money, no family and no English” and now leads Geomagic. She contributed to the development of the Mosaic Internet browser that blossomed into Netscape.