New Speaker 0:00

Here is one of the smartest people that has ever existed in Silicon Valley.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 0:07

India produced Professor Rajeev Motwani. All Indians must know about him.

New Speaker 2 0:10

Rajiv Motwani is sort of a legendary character in startups led by technical insight.

New Speaker 0:16

The entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley that he has influenced and helped and mentored is in the hundreds. I met Rajeev and Asha soon after the founding of Google. Rajiv was Larry and Sergey’s professor.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 0:33

Sergey, then co-founder of Google, said whenever you use a piece of technology globally, anywhere, there’s a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 0:41

Right, that is true.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 0:42

So you have been investing in this West India Corridor for the last, I would say, 20 years now.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 0:47

Our way of making sure that bright young people with serious entrepreneurial energy and chutzpah and sales skills are getting exposure along with our network. It’s important that Indians come in large cohorts and get to know the ecosystem here. That’s what we are investing in.

So my hope is that more people from Silicon Valley will wake up and say, we need to have influence as Indians. How can we be better communicators between US and India? How can we be part of this corridor?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:23

Hi, this is Siddhartha Ahluwalia, your host at Neon Show and Managing Partner at Neon Fund, a fund that invests in the best of enterprise AI companies built between US, India, Corridor. Today I have with me Asha Jadeja. Asha, welcome to the Neon Show podcast.

So glad to have you today with us.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 01:43

Thank you so much for having me.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:45

To our audience, you know, I want to tell about you and Rajeev, right? You are the founder of Motwani Jadeja Foundation. And you and Rajeev have been the founding stakeholders of Google, right?

Your lead has been Professor Rajeev Motwani, mentored Google founders, Sergey and Larry. And he co-authored the PageRank paper. And it’s very proud for India that, you know, among the best technologies in the world that has changed the world, right, we have an Indian who built or contributed to the technology.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 02:18

Yes, the DNA of Google is Rajeev Motwani. That’s the DNA. And every Indian should know that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 02:25

And you know, I’m very grateful that, you know, Motwani Jadeja Foundation and you took a bet on Neon and me and got us to Davos. And that unlocked a bunch of, you know, opportunities for us globally. So let’s start, you know, by your journey and Rajeev’s journey, right?

How did you both come from India to the U.S. and how did, you know, you became the founding stakeholders of Google?

Asha Jadeja Motwani 02:54

So Siddhartha, basically, we both came here like everybody else, as students. We came on F-1 visa, except on different universities. I came to USC at first, Rajeev came to UC Berkeley.

And Rajeev came from IIT Kanpur. I came from Ahmedabad, from CEPT. And I was studying urban planning.

Rajeev’s PhD work was in computer science. And we both actually met in UC Berkeley in grad school. And we, you know, at some point got married in 1990.

And Rajeev had an offer from Stanford at that point to be teaching computer science. He had already joined as an adjunct faculty at that point. And then he was on tenure track, got tenure.

And, you know, we were, then we’ve been a Stanford family since 1989, actually. And right from there on, how did Google happen is a different story. I think Rajeev’s work in fundamental computer science, in theoretical computer science has led to many algorithms, actually, one of which turned out to be PageRank and AnchorText.

And those two algorithms powered the search that ultimately became Google. It was also a paper before it became Google. And so Rajeev got founder shares in the company.

And I think it was four or five people only that got founder shares apart from Larry and Sergey. And of course, we were thrilled to be on the ground floor of a company like Google, which not only changed the destiny of the planet, but also created an entire ecosystem of startups and founders and e-commerce opportunities that the world had never seen before. Also, the vision that Rajeev and Larry and Sergey had was that they would make all the information of the world available to all the people of the planet.

There was an idealistic vision there that Rajeev had, which is that information should be available to everybody. And that’s the first step towards, you know, towards leveling a playing field for the world. And I think that noble vision is what really created that this, you know, the enormity and the reach of Google as a search engine.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 05:11

But how did Google form during that time? And what role did Rajeev play in the entire formation of Google?

Asha Jadeja Motwani 05:20

So first they wrote the paper, right? The PageRank and AnchorText algorithm.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 05:25

It was a PhD paper.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 05:26

It was a PhD paper and they were all authors at that time. And they knew that they had a search engine. But remember, this was a search engine, which was like 12th or 13th.

So there are many more search engines already there, right? So I think the, and I think they had gone to Vinod Khosla at one point and said that, look, we have a very interesting search engine, which is, you know, which is churning out best search results. And this time it was only released on Stanford campus, but the results were excellent.

And I have a feeling that Vinod had made an offer to buy out this, you know, budding little search engine for half a million dollars or something, you know. And people were tempted at that time because nobody had the money in those days. And, you know, people were like, okay, five hundred thousand dollars, a lot of money, you know, why not take it, right?

So that was also there, but that said, I think the company never considered, you know, selling out and ended up incorporating the company and, you know, getting small seed capital from Andy Bechtolsheim, Ram Shriram, Andy Cheriton, David Cheriton was also, Professor Cheriton was one of the seed investors, Rajeev was not a seed investor, he was a founding stakeholder. So they gave him shares, you know, as a founder. And the journey was that once the company was incorporated and they had, you know, eight, nine, ten people, they moved to 165 University Avenue.

If you go there, you should go get a coffee there, actually, because it’s really a nice, you know, there’s a cafe right there. That’s where the company started. And that’s where they had an office with, you know, 20 people or so, and Rajeev would go there and they would all be talking.

The algorithms, such algorithms was their main, you know, topic of discussion in those days. And also they were, another topic of discussion in those days at 165 University Avenue was, you know, buying those servers from Fry’s Electronics Shop. They used to buy those servers, put them together in a stack, put it in a closet and wire them up.

And there used to be a lot of excitement about it. People would, you know, they would call Rajeev and say, come, come quickly, because we have this thing running now. It’s a very techie, very nerdy thing to do.

But those were the days of innocence, right? When, you know, they were so thrilled that people were beginning to use their search engine. And once they released it from Stanford campus, that even the outside world loved it.

And it was only word of mouth. They never, they never advertised it. And people loved it.

So that was the excitement in those days. And then I think first few, you know, key actions were, who were the people they were going to hire for marketing, for business development and stuff like that. All that started happening after they moved out of 165 University Avenue, they moved to Mountain View.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 08:25

And, you know, I just want to highlight one part that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said about, you know, the late Professor Rajeev Motwani. Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, globally, anywhere, there’s a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 08:43

Right. That is true. And this is true even in AI, which I did not know.

But people tell me now, because I am not that tech savvy, but people tell me now that even in the AI, the foundation, you know, models of AI, it’s Rajeev’s mind that’s at work. We are fortunate that, you know, that India produced Professor Rajeev Motwani. We should be proud of him, you know, that and all Indians must know about him.

And once Google went public, we were also actively involved in the whole Google ecosystem. A lot of people who might be leaving Google as co-founders of some other company would first come to Rajeev for investing. Rajeev was also one of the first investors in PayPal.

And we both of us together ended up investing as angels and venture capitalists in about 200 startups. We set up our own small little venture fund called DotEDU Ventures, which was focused on investing in computer science and EE faculty across the U.S., most of the U.S. universities. And so a lot of postdocs, faculty and even Stanford and other PhD students approached us when they were doing fundraising seed round.

And after that, we started funding in, you know, in sort of a series A also. And that is that is how sort of the whole venture capital journey began. And I feel really fortunate to have been part of this, you know, this journey as actually as you know, as a partner in crime.

I was just there with Rajeev and we ended up, you know, investing in a whole bunch of companies that change our lives also and change the destiny of the planet. So so that is the the Google story on, you know, on the on the Motwani Foundation. Foundation is something that we we put together so that once Rajeev passed away, unfortunately, and we wanted to make sure my daughters and I, we wanted to make sure that we set up the foundation in such a way that the foundation continued investing in in programs and people and entrepreneurship projects around the world where we felt that people could have an impact in people like yourself.

And that’s what the foundation does. So we have multiple programs that that have been there, including Rajeev Circle Fellows and History Scholars Program. We funded Vikram Sampath’s, you know, naav.ai, which is doing AI translation, large language model for translating books in history books into, you know, multiple Indian languages. So these are the kind of projects that the Motwani Foundation is now doing. And, you know, personally, I’m also beginning to play a role in the Republican Party because I do believe that the idea of sort of putting America first from the American perspective is a good idea. It’s a solid idea.

It also strengthens the American vision of of a capitalist society, a society that is driven by market forces and not by the government. Government is there as an enabler, as a guardrail, but not as the main architect of an economy. Economy has to be driven by market forces.

And that’s why I feel that the Republican Party is really worth backing. And I’m one of the backers.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:04

And why is that like among the Indian diaspora, you are the largest backer and you are the one trying to move the India-U.S. corridor forward. Why are we not seeing more people come together to do it?

Asha Jadeja Motwani 12:19

You know, sadly, the, I think the Indian diaspora has been, it comes in various varieties, right? Various sizes and shapes. Indian diaspora, you have one segment of people that is very highly successful doctors and dentists and people in the medical field.

Then there is those who are highly successful in the hotel, motel industry, which also very, you know, highly talented people with high net worth. The Silicon Valley diaspora is different, right? In the sense that it is much more driven by the innovation ecosystem.

And what’s interesting is that they are also much wealthier. So my hope is that as people like myself start pushing the borders, you know, the pushing the boundaries on what’s possible in Washington, D.C., that more people from Silicon Valley will wake up and say, we need to have influence as Indian diaspora to say, how can we be better communicators between U.S. and India? How can we be part of this corridor that can be a channel of communication between our two countries?

Surprisingly, you know, when I look at our foundation has been funding multiple think tanks and university programs on India studies, it is shocking that we don’t have too many India scholars. You know, in the think tank world, I’ve been looking for India scholars to support. There is a handful, three, four, five, while the Chinese would be 500.

So the thing is that we have such a disparity in the amount, the number of scholars that we have even in the think tank world, or the number of professors studying Indian political economy. We have a lot of Indian professors studying engineering and computer science, sure, chemical engineering, sure, business, sure. But we don’t have people studying policy, political economy, statecraft and security.

We need that desperately. So that’s what I’m hoping that more and more of this will happen. In the Washington, D.C. circles, do we have influence? Absolutely not. The Indian diaspora has not been investing as much as we could. I think it will happen.

But right now, there is, except for a few of us, there aren’t too many people. And it will happen. I think I’m the first one, probably one of the first largest donors in the Republican Party.

And I’ve been working pretty closely on supporting initiatives that, you know, support things that are dear to J.D. Vance and, you know, President Trump and so on. And I think it will continue. I think we will see more and more of this happening.

One important thing that I want to bring to your attention is that a lot of the Silicon Valley is shifting rightward. A lot of Silicon Valley used to be left. Then it came to the center.

After the Biden administration, for some reason, I think the Silicon Valley as a whole started shifting to the right in terms of values, conservative values of saying less regulation, less big government and more freedom for the tech sector to do what it needs to do, which is innovate. So that’s one thing. Along with the Silicon Valley, I’m also seeing a movement of the Indian diaspora moving to the right slowly.

70 percent of Indians, Indian diaspora people normally vote Democratic and 30 percent Republican. I think we’ll start seeing a shift now. It will be more like 60-40, 60 Democrat, 40 Republican.

So there is a shift happening. And I think it could be driven by values of less regulation.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:18

And why do you think the current Republican policies, which used to be pro-India for the longest period of time, now have shifted to be, you know, 25 percent tariff on India. Today it became 50 percent just because India is buying Russian oil.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 16:35

So the best way for India to present this scenario to the rest of the world should be that we are a peace builder. We are a peacemaker between Ukraine and Russia. India is the only country that has its foot in the door open with Russia and with Ukraine.

We have a good relationship with Russia. We have a good relationship with the U.S. and with Ukraine. And in fact, even with China.

So what the Indians need to do is play up that strength that we have as a peace builder in the region and talk about it more than just the oil. Oil, yes, we’ll continue buying. We are a poor nation.

We need the energy. And if we can get cheap crude oil from Russia, why not? But that doesn’t mean that we will not buy LNG from U.S. That doesn’t mean that we will not buy more weapon systems, more sophisticated weapon systems from U.S. We should reassure U.S. about this because U.S. is a very important trade partner. And we, India, is extremely important to the U.S. as a strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific. So, yes, I think we need to we need to make that bargain. And I am confident that Prime Minister Modi and his team will be back to the negotiating table soon.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:51

So as part of your life journey, I believe you and Rajeev started investing together roughly with the advent of Google in 1999. You formalized it. And then large part you spent investing in developing the ecosystem.

Starting 2012, you started your journey beyond tech and started focusing a lot on how to make sure that Indian talent gets a lot of opportunities. Talk about how you’re splitting your time between your various initiatives today.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 18:24

Right. So I think, you know, the. So with the Rajeev Circle Fellowship and the Davos Fellows Programs and so on, all these things that we have are our way of making sure that bright young people with serious entrepreneurial energy and chutzpah and sales skills are getting exposure along with our network in places like Palo Alto, at the TiECon, in places like at the World Economic Forum or in places like the UN General Assembly.

It’s important that Indians come in large cohorts and get to know the ecosystem here. That’s what we are investing in. And we are seeing enormous benefits of these small gestures.

And these are, relatively speaking, minor investments. These are not major, you know, sort of even cost outlays, but having that confidence of showing up in Silicon Valley from India when you’ve never been here before or for people to come with me to Davos for the first time or come with me to the Aspen Security Conference for the first time. I think these things open one’s mindset to what the possibilities are.

There’s confidence building and people build, Indians are extremely good at building networks. So, which is wonderful, this is great. I mean, people like yourself, you know, you were in Davos with me, Siddhartha, and you did an incredible job of helping that entire cohort of yours, getting to know people there and taking Neon Fund itself to the next height, which is great.

And look, for next year, you are helping me with the next cohort. So this is, you know, this is how we build up our nation, right, one brick at a time. You know, and this is a proud moment for all of us.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:11

Thank you so much, Asha, because of the opportunity that Neon got at Davos, right. Our Neon ecosystem in Switzerland increased by 10x, right. I mean, I had never been to Switzerland before.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 20:26

Yeah, I’m very, by the way, I’m very proud of Neon Fund for investing in some stellar companies and, you know, your own efforts here in Silicon Valley. And, you know, we are proud to be part of your journey.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:37

Thank you so much, Asha. So this ability to give back in various forms, right, can you tell, like, how does the intent for it build it over a period of time? And how did then you choose which efforts, which efforts also you say that I’ll not be part of this, because it also requires saying no to many things to be able to focus on a few things.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 21:04

The intent to give back is something that is there in all of us, you know, Siddhartha, all of us. I think a lot of people, as you’ve seen, the largest, you know, the diaspora that gives, that gives, there’s, you know, the repatriation of funds, right? I think Indian’s diaspora is the one that sends the largest amount back to India, to its family.

And I think it used to be 80 billion two years ago. I think it’s probably closer to 120 billion now, which the Indian sent back home to family.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:35

It’s bigger than the foreign investments in India.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 21:38

Isn’t that amazing?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:39

Yeah.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 21:39

So the Indian diaspora has always had an intention to give back to the country because it understands the strength that India has given all of us in making us who we are. So there is always that, that intention has been there for me from the beginning, from the day that I landed here, I’ve always had this feeling that, you know, something needs to be done about back home where we can help those who are, you know, who might be seeking, you know, certain attention. How do we pick projects to fund?

So with Rajeev Circle Fellows Program, initially it used to be when I had the time and I was, of course, much younger, it used to be much more based on sort of the people I could reach, people I could run, I would run into in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Bangalore and stuff like that. Later on, we started having a process. So then we have a team in India.

There’s a team based in Dubai in India, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Dubai. They helped put together a sort of a process by which people would apply for the Rajeev Circle Fellowship for people to come to the US for the Silicon Valley Plunge. Same thing.

There was a process for finding candidates to come to Davos. And we do the same process for taking people to the UN General Assembly and just exposing large cohorts of enterprising young Indians to the global ecosystem, right, and plugging them into the right networks. Once you plug them into the network, they know what to do.

How do we say no? So the yes answer is easier because it’s, you know, it’s a process now and it’s become a well-oiled machine now. Things that we sometimes say no to are things where we don’t have expertise.

So some of the things, unfortunately, where we can’t invest is health. We just don’t have that expertise in health, telemedicine and medical devices. We don’t know that stuff.

So there are times when I see very promising projects, but I don’t know how to evaluate them and we don’t we don’t do health. But yeah, no, I think these are all projects that we are we are super excited about. And I think I think this is a very opportune time for all of us, those of you who are entrepreneurs in India and those of us who are here in the US to remember that we are critical parts of this corridor.

We are the ones who are forming this human chain that is this corridor between two great nations, two great democracies, irrespective of who the leader is. We are the chain that is creating this enormous, you know, sort of I would say the ripple effect, network effect of value creation between India and the US. And this is this is the most important consequential relationship between two global powers.

And we are we all are part of it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:26

So you have been investing in this US-India corridor for the last, I would say, 20 years now?

Asha Jadeja Motwani 24:32

Yes. Yeah, roughly.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:33

So how have you seen this evolve and where do you see this, what is lacking to take it to the utmost heights?

Asha Jadeja Motwani 24:40

Look, I’ve had some views on this and I’ve tweeted about them many times before. My view right now is that the on the Indian, the obstacles are the greatest on the Indian side. And the reason they are, you know, they are cumbersome is because we have regulatory processes.

We have a big government. We also have oligarchic forces in India where we have, you know, these are friction factors. These are drag factors on on creating those those vectors of value creation.

If there was more freedom for people to be to be enterprising and to grow in a global economy kind of a thing, I think we would have we would have much, much more, much faster growth of the Indian economy. So and I keep seeing, you know, genuine intention of the prime minister wanting to have India reach a 30 trillion dollar size of the economy. But then the government needs to get out of the way.

We have a bureaucracy which is extremely bloated. We have the civil service, which used to exercise a lot of power on on the business sector earlier. It is reduced now.

Thank God. But these regulatory barriers do need to go. There is a there’s a study Siddhartha that came out, which I want you and your viewers to read.

It’s called Jailed for Doing Business. It was done by ORF, Observer Research Foundation in Delhi. Look at the 6000 regulations that companies have to face and some of them have unfortunately, they also have police action.

So, for example, if you don’t meet certain standards in your startup, they could be police. Yeah, jail. You could go to jail.

This is not true in US. In US, there is freedom and there is also there is also penalties which are financial. But you don’t go to jail.

In India, this is these are huge obstacles and people get scared. Sometimes the best entrepreneurs move to Singapore. I mean, remember, the top Indian entrepreneurs come to the US.

They come to the valley. Right. The second tier ends up going to UK or maybe Dubai or something.

Some also go to Singapore because they want to be close to India. But we are losing, this is our brain drain. We are losing the best people because they don’t want to be having to deal with regulations and cumbersome obstacles to business.

So, this is something we need to take very seriously, Indian business, Indian government needs to get out of the way.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:29

Asha, during my time at Davos and when I was with the entire group, right, so there were discussions on, you know, how did you build this foundation and also Rajeev’s legacy, like what kind of person Rajeev was, if you can describe Rajeev more, you know, for the people who are part of foundation and beyond also.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 27:49

Right. So, Rajeev came here as a PhD student in computer science and as a personality, Rajeev was, well, first of all, incredibly popular. He was one of the top teachers.

So, at Stanford, his ratings as a professor were some of the highest in the department, computer science. He was very liked by everybody. Rajeev was also a good guitarist, apart from being a theoretical computer scientist and a deep mathematical mind, he was also, he used to play the guitar, he had a band, you know, and was an incredibly good father and a husband and a son to his parents who are from Delhi.

And, but I think Rajeev’s main interest after, you know, especially after the internet was born, actually, was helping entrepreneurs who were tech savvy, figure out what is it that they were building. He was very interested in working with startups. So, he used to whiteboard with various founders on what the company product should look like.

There was a company called, you know, gosh, I’m forgetting the name now, but Adchemy. It was the founder’s name was Murthy Nukala and Murthy was once telling me even, you know, when he had passed, that Rajeev had created like literally a blueprint for what the company should build on a whiteboard and given it to Murthy and said, run with it now. So, Rajeev used to do that a lot.

He used to be sitting at his cafe on University Avenue, sitting with a founder, you know, he would be drawing on the table. There used to be these pieces of white paper. He would draw plans for a product on the table and make sure that the founder had that.

And sometimes people would run with it. And, you know, it didn’t matter to him whether he had a stake in the company or not. He used to create these product plans because he loved doing it.

And a lot of people also told me, a lot of people that Rajeev funded tell me that he brought out the best in them. So, it wasn’t just that he was mentoring them and guiding them and all that, but he enabled them to be their best self as they worked with him, which is such a gift. Many of us don’t have that, you know.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:15

Thank you so much. You are carrying that values forward. You brought us out on a global stage in Davos.

So, we’ll be eternally grateful to you and Rajeev for starting this culture.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 30:24

No, that’s it. Thanks. You know, it’s very special that he had that.

So, you know.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:30

But thank you so much, Asha.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 30:31

Thank you, Siddhartha.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:32

I’m grateful to doing this podcast with you.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 30:33

Thank you. Yes.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:34

I’m grateful that we could, you know, get the incredible work that you are doing throughout this medium.

Asha Jadeja Motwani 30:41

Thank you so much, Siddhartha. This is good. It’s been wonderful getting to know you.

So, thank you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:47

Thank you.