Fail often, fail fast: Vinod Dham

'Father of Pentium' - an adage closely associated with Vinod Dham - is as old as 1995. He has done many things since and his Linkedin profile sums it up well: "40+ years of experience in developing semiconductor products and technologies, last ten in making investments."  He is a Founding Managing Director at IndoUS Venture Partners, a firm with investments in both Flipkart and Snapdeal - two of India's largest e-commerce marketplaces. In an interview with BT's Goutam Das, Dham dishes out sound advice for both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

BT: Your best advice to an entrepreneur would be?

Dham: Focus and execute. The reason is that ideas are dime a dozen. What matters is if you can take the idea and translate that into a commercial success. Therein lies 99 per cent of your effort, energy, and time. The second one is what you think you are going to build, most likely is not what it may turn out to be. Therefore, having the flexibility and choosing the right timing of when to pivot is a very important element of being successful. In a start-up, you are moving very fast with somebody else's money. There is lot of competition. There are a lot of overlapping ideas. Your ability to learn real time, make those mistakes, learn from them, and as we say in the Silicon Valley, 'fail often, fail fast'.

BT: Do you have an example of a company you lead that had to pivot?

Dham: Silicon Spice. The original idea was to utilize an IP that came out of MIT, which was way ahead of its time, called re-configurable computing. You could take a piece of silicon and re-configure it through software to do different functions. It turned out it was not a practical idea because when you programmed it, its performance was extremely poor. The idea was dead-on-arrival (laughs). Cisco was an investor. The person on the board asked if we would build a chip that the company needs desperately - a voice-over IP (VOIP) chip (late 90s). That's exactly what we ended up doing.  (Silicon Spice was acquired by Broadcom for $1.2 billion).

BT: Since you straddle the VC world, what guidance do you have for VCs?

Dham: Diversify. You will not put all of your eggs in one basket. Second, as a VC, having the discipline of investment - when we came to India we saw everyone rushing out to make investments. The tendency is to invest in 5-6 companies so that when you meet peers, you can say "I have invested". You may have done it too fast. Discipline also means you time yourself. You have to have the discipline of saying if it's a $200 million fund to be invested over four years, I can invest only $50 million a year. If it's June and I have already invested $50 million, I will not invest any further till December.  That is very hard. The good news is, since you didn't, in the third year, a company like Snapdeal shows up. Now you have the money to put in while others who were rushing, don't. These are subtleties but gives you a leverage.

BT: But there is something called the Fear Of Missing Out?

Dham: Yes, but disciplined companies don't fall into that trap of fear. They know from experience that opportunities are always coming. The nature of the opportunities may change, but they will always be there.