Kamla: This is Kamla Bhatt. Today my guest is Yogen Dalal, who is Managing Director, at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley.
Mayfield currently manages over $ 2 billion and has invested in 500 companies out of which 100 went public. Mayfield is also active in India and has invested in a handful of companies there.
Yogen has been in Silicon Valley since the 1970s and worked with Vint Cerf, the father of internet at Stanford and co-authored the specification for Internet Transmission Control Program or TCP. Yogen was a founding member of the Claris Corporation and Metaphor Computer Systems and prior to that, he worked at Zee Rock’s Park. He’s currently on the boards of Naunce, Revenue Science, Audiofeast and others.
Yogen has a PhD from Stanford and has an undergrad degree from IIT, Mumbai. Welcome to the show, Yogen.
Yogen: Thank you Kamla. Always nice to talk to you and get your perspectives on the world.
Kamla: Today I’m going to get your perspectives and the valley. What is the magic of Silicon Valley?
Yogen: Well, the magic is of Silicon Valley is that you have people who want to change the world- people who come with fresh ideas and are who are given the opportunity to live their dreams. But the true magic of Silicon Valley is that failure is not viewed as something negative.
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If you fail the first time, that means you try to do something that was amazingly difficult and you’re given the second and many times a third and a fourth time.
Kamla: Can this magic be re-created in other parts of the world?
Yogen: People have tried to do that and in some cases, its been successful but I don’t think there’s any other place like Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley has been built now for over 30-40 years. It’s a culture; it’s a way of thinking. There are so many different people who are all trying to change the world that it’s a melting pot of ideas where one idea leads to another purely by accident.
Kamla: So you came here in ’72 and just a year before that the term “Silicon Valley” had been coined.
Yogen: That’s right. I think the whole notion was that somebody, a Fred Terman who was the Dean of Engineering at Stanford had this dream that industry and academia work together and many of his students were the ones that helped create what we now think of the Silicon Valley, particularly Hewlett & Packard who were one of the first true entrepreneurs of this Valley along with many other people. And Silicon Valley owes its term for the fact that it really was the electronics capital of the world where chips and semi-conductors and electronics were being designed. Now we think of Silicon Valley as Google and Yahoo and Apple Computer and variety of other companies like Cisco.
Kamla: You missed out on Facebook.