His Ph.D advisor, David Cheriton, was one of the early investors in Google. “He wrote a cheque for $1 million and made billions in the bargain,” says Hemant Kanakia with a wide grin.
Maybe watching that smart angel investment move by his Stanford professor inspired Kanakia's own shift from being a successful entrepreneur to angel investing.
This IIT Bombay alumnus, who did stints with TCS and Bell Labs, says he started out on his own mainly to stop the long commute from Washington DC to New Jersey. “My wife took up a teaching job in DC and instead of doing the commute, I decided to start my own enterprise,” he says.
In 1996, he founded Torrent Networking Systems, a company that built a next generation of fast Internet Routers. Within three years, Ericsson acquired the company for $450 million. “The investors who had funded my company exited making 50 X on their investment,” says Kanakia.
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