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Overview
Company: TiE
Interviewee: Raj Jaswa, President TiE and President Dyyno, Inc
Web site: www.siliconvalley.tie.org
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Q. How was TiE started, and what was the motivation behind its inception?
“TiE was started in Silicon Valley about 15 years ago, by a group of successful entrepreneurs focused on culturing, nurturing and fostering entrepreneurship across many different industries in Silicon Valley. It stands for The Indus-Entrepreneurs and it’s an open organization that supports entrepreneurship across the globe.”
Q. How does TiE support entrepreneurship?
"Entrepreneurship is not something that you can learn in a business school. You cannot even learn it in a corporate environment, because both of these organizations do not really create the environment that the entrepreneur is going to build his business in. At TiE, we decided to nurture entrepreneurship by providing support in three areas: mentoring, education and networking.”
Q. What are the benefits to TiE’s education programs?
“Entrepreneurs are generally very focused on their specialized skills. They are very good at what they do. However, to build a company you need other skills. Through our TiE Institute, we provide a broad understanding of all the other areas that they need to know to build a company. The Institute provides regular workshops to help round out the entrepreneur’s knowledge base about building his company. The institute also provides legal workshops, accounting workshops, finance, and sales and marketing workshops.”
Q. What does mentoring services do you provide to startups?
“It is really important for an entrepreneur to make the right business decisions. But that is something that they have little experience in. Through mentors, who are successful business people, we help entrepreneurs learn how to make the right decisions.”
Q. How about networking?
“Networking is a major area we focus on. Entrepreneurs typically associate with a very limited number of people. If they are very good engineers, that’s who they know. If they are very good salespeople, they know their customers. Through TiE, we connect them with everyone they need to know to build their company. We connect them with lawyers, accountants, business partners; and other engineers. We help them connect with subsidiaries that they might want, or partnerships that they want to make across the globe.” “
Q. What are some key challenges that startups face?
“The first key challenge that an entrepreneur faces, (once they have a brilliant idea and have developed it into an opportunity) is getting a savvy investor to believe in them and invest in their company. Once they are past that hurdle, they have to decide how they should they start building a company? Typically they are constantly scrambling for resources.“
Q. Do you have any advice for entrepreneurs?
“These days, entrepreneurs need to think global from day one. TiE is now a global network, well positioned, to help entrepreneurs get resources across the globe when they are building their company.“
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