SM Reader 3rd Eye posted an interesting stat from my corner of the RealWorld on the News Tab -

Desi’s head up 4 of 12 2007 IPO’s from Mass State

In the past two months alone, four Massachusetts based companies with Indian chief executives have registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public: Starent Networks Corp, Netezza Corp, BladeLogic Inc and Virtusa Corp.

They represent a third of state companies that have filed for initial public offer (IPOs) this year.

Now Desi tech entrepreneurship is not only alive and well but also well-discussed here on the Mutiny. For a host of reasons, as the article notes, Desi’s have done an admirable job in Tech (and particularly, it appears, in MA 2007). Still, there’s an interesting angle revealed by the firms profiled here. The theme is probably quite familiar to Desi’s who live / breath the tech biz and less so to those outside of it —

  • Starent is in the mobile infrastructure space. Interestingly, my company (Roundbox) has done some work with them in the past around a relatively esoteric technology called BCMCS (Starent competitor Airvana, co-founded by a desi dude, has some brief info on BCMCS here - just in case some of you need help getting to sleep tonight).
  • Netezza is in the burgeoning datawarehousing biz and falls somewhere between companies like Network Appliance and the Mighty Oracle. In the tech systems world, everything old is destined to be new again and Netezza’s product is, in some ways, a remix of old skool integrated database hardware systems - but ridiculously more capable.
  • BladeLogic builds software for datacenter management. So if your firm fancies building a Google-esque data center (albeit likely on a dramatically smaller scale) and needs warez to manage the deployment of apps inside this wide area cluster, BladeLogic is your solution.
  • Virtusa was new to me and apparently has staked out a corner of the outsourcing / offshoring biz.

Common threads? Well, as many a Valley observor has casually noted in the past, depending on how you classify Virtusa, all of ‘em are deep in the back end / infrastructure / “systems” segment of the tech biz. Unlike the consumer or “apps” space, this segment is primarily about $$$ being made by geeks selling stuff to other geeks. And as a direct result, the tech is front and center and is often Truly Hard. It’s not a stretch to say these guys are often the geekiest, most hard core of the geeks (and, uh, I really mean that as a compliment).

Second, these particular tech firms were all founded by Desi Uncles. By contrast ABCD’s are more likely to be found at App co’s rather than Systems (here’s one recently discussed example; here are some others). At an app company, user experience drives the firm far more than the efficiency of the plumbing - the underlying tech is often in a supporting role to the business model rather than the raison d’etre of the company.

Now before the usual suspects jump up and scream about stereotypes and generalizations, it’s worth pointing out that there are certainly prominent exceptions (for ex., here are some FOB-founded App companies; depending on how you want to classify me + my company, I’m an ABCD working Systems). It’s just that living and breathing Silicon Valley air makes it hard not to notice the FOB = Systems and ABCD = Apps correlation. One indirect and telling datapoint, in the Bay Area at least, both the ABCD vs FOB and Apps vs. Systems ratios co-vary as you move from downtown San Francisco / SOMA to the other end of the Bay - San Jose. One end is Banana Republic / content dotcoms, the other end, uh, Cisco. Any guess which end has more authentic Indian food?

Why? Well, part of the answer is that systems co’s are generally run by, well, older folks. ABCD’s simply haven’t been in tech long enough. I think however, part of the reason is that selling an app to the mass market requires a lot of pop cultural context - anyone wanna guess what Ms Parasol brought to the table? By contrast, success in the systems world is about discussing bits & bytes with other tech geeks - a culture which was likely more universally accessible than the secret to MySpace for IIT-grad FOB Uncles. Combine it with immigration patterns which overwhelmingly favored the Geeks rather than the Hip and you get more desi Starent’s & Junipers rather than YouTube’s and Flickr’s.