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

                                It all began in Stanford University where Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the PhD students. They were working on their PhD project based on PageRank algorithm. An Indian-American Rajeev Motwani was one of the co-authors of their paper on PageRank   algorithm . When Page and Brin decided to float their own company, they badly needed funds. It was then that they approached Kavitark Ram Shriram, an Indo-American Venture Capitalist. Ram signed the first cheque to fund Google. It was of about five -lakh dollars . And thus was born Google with Ram as the founding director and board member. Kavitark Ram was born in Bangalore and raised in Chennai. His father passed away when he was three. Shriram holds a bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Loyola College in Madras University. Ram is also an MBA from University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. After moving to the U.S. he joined Netscape in 1994. Later he became the president of Junglee, an onli