ASPIRE

The story of Shri Thanedar could well be a story of a Bollywood movie. His rise from poverty in Belgaum to become an entrepreneur in Michigan and then becoming a Congressman in US is nothing short of a fairytale. Shri was born in 1955 in a village called Chikodi near Belgaum (Karnataka). Like any other lower middle-class child, he did some odd jobs to manage his family expenses. He managed to score only  55% marks in his std-10 . After getting a bachelor's degree in chemistry, he went on to do his Masters in the subject from the University of Bombay. He then had a brief stint as a scientist at Mumbai's Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. In 1979, Thanedar left for the US when he was 24. He studied for his PhD from the University of Akron in US. He got a doctorate in polymer chemistry. Additionally, he completed his Masters in Business Administration from Fontbonne University.  After working as a scientist and a scholar for some days, Thanedar decided to pursue entrepreneurship. In 1

Vinod Khosla was born to an army officer on 28 January 1955 in New Delhi. He studied at the famous Mount St. Mary’s School in Delhi. Later, he completed electrical engineering from IIT Delhi and had started the first computer club in any IIT to do computer programming. Afterwards, he did his MS in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University followed by MBA from Stanford University. In 1980, Khosla co-founded Daisy Systems, which created (computer-aided design) CAD system for electrical engineers. In 1982, he co-founded Sun Microsystems. Sun microsystems created Java programming language and within first five years, made $1 billion in annual sales. Satya Nadella was an employee in Sun before he joined Microsoft. In 2004, Khosla founded Khosla Ventures which today manages approximately $1 billion of investor capital. In 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle for $7.4 billion. Vinod Khosla also challenged Intel's monopoly by developing Nexgen/AMD. He also conceptualized the idea