Par Chadha is an electrical engineer with a long history of creating innovative companies in the technology arena as well as building bundled industry solutions through M&A of leading platforms.
Chadha founded Osicom Technologies with his wife in 1981 and drove innovation through the development of numerous Patents: Patent 5343324 – Bias control and method for electro-optic modulators; Patent 6151336 – Time division multiplexing expansion subsystem; and Patent 6400478 – A wavelength division multiplexed optical transmission system with expanded bidirectional transmission capacity.
Par Chadha interview
Q: In your career you’ve ran and worked with dozens of tech startups – it’s not a small feat. How do you juggle your resources in meeting the demand of your startups?
A: It would be impossible without a great team. The key is to find individuals with passion and focus, who know what needs to be done, and won’t stop until they have results in hand. When you have the right team, with the right focus, you don’t need to juggle, you let them lead and I can turn my attention to finding the next hill to take.
Q: When did your serial entrepreneurial journey actually begin? Please share your journey a bit in details
A: I started as a software designer writing operating systems for computers. But saw massive opportunities in what was happening with evolution of technologies, rising network speeds and miniaturization. Before I knew it, my wife and I were building single chip PC’s in our basement. But, I yearned for more something truly disruptive and transformational. We then started targeting acquisitions of undernourished technology arms of large enterprises in transmission of voice, video and data. Our strategy to buy successful networking companies and combine their technologies to build large systems for telcos, cable companies and businesses paid off. We were first to market to provide disruptive technology to cable companies so they can for the first time have scalable bandwidth to carry content, voice and data. It disrupted the hold of telephone companies on voice and data. It changed the industry forever with cost of voice and data fell to pennies from dollars. The business landscape changed to – instead of people going to work for the first time people could work from home or another continent.
We got lucky too. We were one of the 1st companies to build systems on silicon by packaging technologies into small silicon chip. We believed if the cost was low enough, companies would like to put intelligence in all parts of their business and home environment. Today, whether you are watching a movie or making a voice or IP call or talking to your printer, chances are high that our patented technology is playing some small role in it.
Q: What’s next in your journey?
A: In 2001, we launched HandsOn Ventures to deploy our next strategy – Reverse migration: disrupt the migration of work moving to global locations, in-part due to the abundance of bandwidth and also due to lowering of transmission cost, by injecting technology to automate.
As a result of this strategy, today we have almost a billion in revenue and over 16,000 employees in mission critical areas of banks, healthcare, insurance industries where with automation enabled with analytics, we thrive in complex environments where people and technology deal with transformation of the analog world into the digital world.
Q: Please share one advice for budding tech startup founders out there
A: How about one of my favorite quotes:
“Great heights reached were not attained by sudden flight, but while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night”
And one by Andy Grove “Only the Paranoid survive”.
Take your pick, they do work well together.
Connect with Par Chadha today at:
http://www.bloomberg.com/profiles/people/15360898-parvinder-s-chadha
