Kanwal Rekhi is one of Silicon Valley’s most influential — and least conventional — pioneers: the first Indian-American founder and CEO to take a company public on the NASDAQ, a co-architect of India’s entrepreneurial revolution, and a mentor to more startup founders than he can count.

Born into a lower-middle-class refugee family after the Partition of British India into an independent state, Rekhi answered JFK’s call for engineers to help in America’s space race against the Soviet Union and arrived in America in 1967 with $8 in his pocket and a thick accent—and was promptly underestimated. He transformed that doubt into fuel. After earning his master’s degree in electrical engineering, he became a gifted engineer and a daring founder, co-creating Excelan to commercialize Ethernet and TCP/IP standards, which became the basis of the Internet. He then led that company to a successful IPO in 1987 before spearheading its merger with Novell, becoming the first Indian-American executive at a multinational corporation

Rekhi’s legacy, however, extends far beyond his own success. As the president of TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneur), he helped co-found and build the world’s largest mentoring network for Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and jump-started India’s startup ecosystem years before it became a global force. He has mentored politicians (U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee, to name a few) and his philanthropy has reshaped business education and entrepreneurship programs across India and the U.S. Kanwal has also mentored 10,000+ entrepreneurs and invested in more than 200 early-stage teams, including Exodus Communications (IPO), Poshmark (IPO), redBus (acq. Ibibo Group), Sierra Atlantic (Hitachi), and NetMagic (NTT).

Today, Kanwal is regarded as a foundational figure in global tech, a champion of immigrant ingenuity, and a truth-telling advocate for entrepreneurship as society’s most powerful engine of progress. His memoir, The Groundbreaker: Entrepreneurship, the American Dream, and the Rise of Modern India, tells the story of a man whose life mirrors the rise of modern India and the ascent of Indian-Americans in technology and leadership. He spends his full time, energy, and attention on building Inventus, a venture capital fund, and Silicon Valley Quad (SVQ), an angel syndicate. A prolific blogger with a substantial LinkedIn following, Kanwal is also featured in the forthcoming documentary Breaking the Code, based on his life, which will launch in mid-2026. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.