Lawyer Brings New Faces to South Asian Group
By RAJIV VYAS
Shivbir “Shiv” Grewal, a corporate lawyer with a penchant for field hockey, says he’s shaking up the Southland’s dominant networking group for South Asians.
The Indus Entrepreneurs Southern California chapter, a networking and mentoring group known as TiE, has seen membership stagnate in the past couple of years. Some disenchanted younger members even threatened to bolt and form a rival group.
As TiE’s new president, Grewal said he wants to expand the group beyond its technology roots and bolster its role as a catalyst for deals. He’s even talking about bringing non-South Asians into the fold.
“There is no question within the South Asian community that TiE is the organization to belong to,at least for networking purposes,” said Grewal, a partner at Newport Beach law firm Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth. But “there was lot of dissatisfaction prior to my becoming president, partly because lethargy had crept into the organization.”
Grewal took over in February from Safi Qureshey, who founded the local TiE chapter five years ago and served as president since. Normally, a chapter president serves for two years. But Qureshey, a co-founder of AST Research Inc. and a venture capitalist, stayed at the helm longer in a bid to build up the group.
“We had spent a lot of time and effort building this organization,” Qureshey said. “It was time to hand over the responsibilities to a new group.”
But Grewal is careful not to lay blame for TiE’s current challenges at the feet of his predecessor. The group’s recent state “was for no fault of anyone,” he said. “Even I was a committee member.”
TiE is the place to build Rolodexes for Indians, Pakistanis and those from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Members include entrepreneurs aiming to raise money, professionals looking for career breaks or businessmen seeking to give back something to the South Asian community.
“TiE has provided a forum for recent & #233;migr & #233;s from South Asia to interact with business members from the same region, easing their assimilation,” Grewal said.
The group includes OC’s most influential South Asians. Charter members include H.K. Desai, chief executive of Aliso Viejo-based QLogic Inc., and Ashwin Rangan, chief technology officer at Newport Beach-based Conexant Systems Inc.
TiE’s charter members join by invitation and pay big annual dues. They elected Grewal, and have tapped Conexant’s Rangan as their next president.
Grewal has moved quickly. Within a month of being elected, he replaced half of the people on TiE’s 16-member executive committee.
“I was shocked to find the average age of an executive committee member was in the mid-40s before I became the president,” said Grewal. “Now the average age is in the mid-30s.”
Grewal also put in place a new executive committee (Qureshey remains). Other committee members also are picked by Grewal.
“There was a perception that TiE was dragging along, there were no changes,” Grewal said. “One of the reasons why we wanted to bring new people was for new ideas and new thinking and also to change our perception.”
Grewal has had to strike a balance. The group is largely free of political tensions, though some observers say its influence swung too far in favor of Pakistanis under Qureshey, himself a Pakistan native. Grewal has gone out of his way to split the group’s leadership down the middle,even adding an extra Pakistani to the executive committee.
TiE got its informal start in 1992 at a lunch meeting of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and professionals. The small group held monthly meetings that ended up attracting more members.
By 1994, TiE grew into a formal group with members and participants worldwide. Today it counts 30 chapters globally and more than 5,000 members.
In Southern California, Grewal said he aims to expand TiE beyond its tech beginnings.
“TiE membership should reflect the economic diversity here,” he said. “My mandate is to take it outside of IT,healthcare, retail, entertainment.”
Anand Gala, one of the new committee members, operates a chain of coffee shops. Another, Darius Gandhi, works as a vice president of Cerritos law office The Chugh Firm.
Besides bringing in new committee members, Grewal said he also stopped the defection of younger members who were looking to start a rival group.
Gandhi and other younger members of TiE had formed an informal offshoot called EiT, short for entrepreneurs in training, to help out those starting their own businesses.
“We found that (older TiE members) weren’t listening to us,” said Gandhi, now chairman of entrepreneurship at TiE. “We said if they can’t join us, then we should try and beat them. The youths were totally overlooked.”
Grewal realized TiE was on the verge of breaking apart, according to Gandhi.
“After Shiv came in, he saw what was happening,” Gandhi said. “He and I had a heart-to-heart talk. He gave us full autonomy.”
TiE and EiT started a project dubbed chalo (Hindi for “let’s go”), which works with four OC startups. Each company is getting help from TiE members on fundraising, human resources and marketing. The companies are assigned TiE mentors.
The Southern California chapter holds monthly meetings every third Wednesday in Cerritos. They start with cocktails followed by dinner,mostly Indian food,and a talk by a chief executive or senior executive, often from tech companies.
“In the future we will be having speakers from other fields as well,” Grewal said.
For most, TiE is about connections. Take the case of Sterling, Va.-based FirstRing Inc., a manager of Indian call centers for U.S. customers.
“Shiv used his TiE contact to help me raise money,” said Gurjot Singh Khalsa, FirstRing’s founder.
Grewal, who served as FirstRing’s corporate lawyer, introduced Singh to funding sources that helped him raise $15 million in a couple of years, he said.
“Economic motive is far more effective than charity,” Grewal said. “Capitalism has succeeded more than socialism or communism. Profit motive is alive and kicking,TiE makes no bones about that. TiE is for the creation of wealth.”
Oakland-based Channel Capital Auto-mation Inc. was another TiE-backed company.
TiE “helped me network to find investors and also mentoring,” said Sri Lankan Dave Westin, founder and chief executive of the business software developer.
In 1999 and early 2000, Westin raised $2 million from TiE members, including Qureshey and local TiE member Suren Duttia. Grewal also helped Westin raise the money and meet people.
Channel was the first company to be seed funded entirely by charter members. But Channel Capital fell victim to the tech bust: it closed shop a year or so ago after it couldn’t raise a second round.
Grewal said his goal is to lure more venture capitalists to its monthly meetings.
To do so, “We have to change the location from Cerritos,” he said. “No VC is going to go to Cerritos. We have to either meet in Orange County or in Los Angeles.”
Grewal said he already is thinking about holding TiE’s big annual meeting in OC. For the past five years, TiE yearly confabs were held in Cerritos.
Membership is another issue. In the tech boom, professionals didn’t mind plunking down a few hundred bucks every year for TiE dues. But membership has stagnated at around 300 in the past few years.
One way of boosting membership: targeting non-South Asians.
“So far it has been exclusively South Asians, but we would like to change that and bring others,” Grewal said.
Recently Grewal contacted Ray Cohen, chief executive of Irvine-based medical device maker Cardiac Science Inc. and asked him to be a charter member. Now Cohen is the first white American to be a local TiE charter member.
Reviving TiE is taking more time and effort than expected for Grewal, whose day job involves working with tech, medical and other companies on securities law and other matters. On average, Grewal said that he is putting in seven to 10 hours a week on TiE work.
“There is lot of work,” he said. “It is a double-edged sword.”
