India’s Silicon Lady

MATEEN SAYEED tracks the success of Vinita Gupta, the first Indian woman to blaze an entrepreneurial trail in Silicon Valley

ON THE ‘power streets’ of Silicon Valley, Vinita Gupta wears her sarees with élan. She embodies the dichotomy of the selfeffacing, loving sister from a ’70s Bollywood movie and the poised, encouraging and supportive mother of the new millennium. She has two teenage daughters and she is the wife of a successful entrepreneur, Naren Gupta.

But her Indian female persona doesn’t end there. She has extended and blended it well with her responsible role as the chairperson of Quick Eagle Networks (formerly Digital Link) —one of the leading providers of high-performance, cost-effective digital network access products. She is an inspirational trailblazer to many young women and is the first Indian woman entrepreneur in Silicon Valley to take her company public — in 1994. She recounts her career with unabashed humility.

Born in Lucknow, to an educated homemaker mother and a civil engineer father who worked for Indian Defence Services, she always did well in her class despite constantly changing schools, as her father’s job moved them around the country. In a family of three daughters, she saw first-hand, her mother’s desire to educate her offspring.

She got into engineering at IIT Roorkee, and stood second in her class; after graduation, she pursued a master’s degree in the US. Vinita wasn’t interested in marriage and wanted to pursue her education first, and enjoyed full support of her parents. She came to University of California in Los Angeles because her married sister and her husband were living in the area. But Vinita was fiercely independent and extremely focused on her goals. She got a job in Silicon Valley, where she met Naren, an original marriage prospect from India who had kept in touch with her. With their parents’ blessings they got married in California.

Vinita worked as an engineer with GTE Lenkurt and thereafter with Bell Northern Research Inc., a research and development arm of Northern Telecom until ’85. She was good at articulating a product idea and helped bring it to market. “After few years of being a good engineer, you start looking at career progression. The next step would have been to become a manager. But Indians then were not considered good communicators or articulators. We were not noticed much beyond our mundane jobs. I thought I needed to do something beyond my normal responsibility if I need to stand out. I learnt to communicate more whenever I got the opportunity,” she says.

ATIME CAME when she felt she had to do something different. “I didn’t want the status quo. I decided I would leave and then look for a better opportunity.” A few months after she left, she called a former colleague who had initiated a prospective business opportunity: their company Digital Link was born in May ’85. Their product idea was based on high-speed data telecommunication lines and their first customer was Fed Ex.

Being a research person Vinita had to learn aspects of manufacturing and selling. However, the bigger challenge came six months later, when her partner called it quits. Suddenly, half her company was gone and she faced insurmountable challenges. She persisted, hired staff and sales started coming in. The company went public in Jan ’94. The stock opened above $100 and at the highest valuation, the company was worth $350 million. She also serves on the board of directors at Integrated Systems Inc., a developer of embedded software and design solutions.

Vinita and her husband Naren, himself an accomplished entrepreneur and currently managing partner of an India focused venture fund, are not smitten by their wealth and status. They are philanthropists to many causes and contributing members of Silicon Valley’s landscape.