How A Rocket Took Off: Juniper Founder Pradeep Sindhu (Part 7)

SM: What is the role of networking going forward? What does the future hold?

PS: In the grand scheme of things, networking is a phenomenally important part of society’s infrastructure. It is the technology that is used to connect people and things together for the purposes of sharing information. It existed 10,000 years ago in a different form. If you look back at history, every time networking technology has improved by an order of magnitude, it has resulted in stupendous things happening. >>>

Looking For A Pilot Entrepreneur To Invest In

Entrepreneurs, I am looking for an entrepreneur with whom to pilot a new service that will be part of the 1M/1M initiative. In collaboration with an outsourced product development company in India, we will invest engineering resources to bring a product to market for an early stage startup. >>>

How A Rocket Took Off: Juniper Founder Pradeep Sindhu (Part 6)

SM: What was going on with the rest of the ecosystem in 1999 and 2000 when you were experiencing this huge ramp? Did Cisco have much of a carrier business?

PS: Cisco sales have always been higher on the enterprise side. That is their bread and butter. I also think that Cisco was late in recognizing that the basic technology they were using to build routers had just changed. Today everyone builds routers the way we designed them. >>>

Deficit Reduction: Speculation Tax?

Paul Volcker said two things on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show on CNN recently: (1) Deficit reduction is critical for America (2) We need engineers, not financial engineers.

You know my point of view on the speculator versus value creator issue. I consider it Capitalism’s Fundamental Flaw that speculators make so much money while value creators toil in relative poverty, sacrificing many years of their lives to build something, to invent, to innovate. As a result, the finance industry has been attracting talented people. The lure of easy money has become a major problem.

So, I propose that Obama and Congress, as part of their financial reform strategy, impose a speculation tax, deductable at source, on banks that pay outlandish bonuses to their speculators. This tax can go as high as 90%. This would mean, if the banking industry decides to pay $50 billion in bonuses, $45 billion of that will go to the government as taxes to reduce deficits.

This will also serve the additional objective of rationalizing the compensation structures of speculators relative to the value creators.

I invite discussion on this topic. It is complex, controversial, and highly contentious. >>>

How A Rocket Took Off: Juniper Founder Pradeep Sindhu (Part 5)

SM: Did segregating the problem set into a control plan and data plane slow you down as you prepared to go to market?

PS: No. It actually proved beneficial to split the problem into the control plane and the data plane. The software does not need to worry about real time. Software moved packets the way routers used to be built. That code path needed to be very tightly optimized. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: Teaching Bootstrapping

Readers, I invite you to join the lively discussion on teaching bootstrapping at the university level. Also, there is now a Facebook page for the blog. You can read all of this week’s posts by clicking on the full article. >>>

How A Rocket Took Off: Juniper Founder Pradeep Sindhu (Part 4)

SM: This was right at the time when Internet was beginning to emerge in mainstream communities.

PS: Exactly. Netscape had just released its browser. I had the opportunity to see the number of Web sites and the amount of bandwidth being used. It was absolutely exploding. It was doubling every six to nine months. >>>

Entrepreneur Journeys Book Review: A Peek At The Way The Minds Of Great Entrepreneurs Work

From Shubashree Desikan’s review of Entrepreneur Journeys for The New Indian Express:

“If you are keen on starting your own business and want a peek at the way the minds of great entrepreneurs work, Sramana Mitra’s series, Entrepreneur Journeys, is a good place to start. The first two volumes consist of highly informative and insightful interviews with some of the star entrepreneurs of recent times from all over the world. In these interviews, each person reveals his or her approach to solving what at the time appeared to be insurmountable obstacles to the growth of their firms. >>>