DOs and DONTs for startups from a 4-time entrepreneur December 20, 2008

Nickhil Jakatdar, the CEO and Co-founder of Vuclip will share his experiences and lessons learned doing the 4 startups. He will talk about the do's and dont's with anecdotes supporting each of them. Nickhil is a successful serial entrepreneur who has founded and sold three companies and is onto his fourth one. He is originally from Pune and is now based in the Silicon valley. He is an advisor and friend to startups in the US and India. I personally find Nickhil's experiences insightful and it is always a pleasure talking to him. Here is Nickhil's bio:

Prior to Vuclip, Nickhil was the President and COO of Praesagus, a MIT incubated start-up that he helped grow to becoming the most widely used design-to-manufacturing modeling software in its class, before its acquisition by Cadence Design Systems. Post-acquisition, Nickhil became Engineering Group Director at Cadence where he ran the entire Manufacturing Modeling Group. Prior to Praesagus, Nickhil helped found and served on the board of directors of CommandCAD, an electrical CAD company that was acquired two years after its founding. Prior to CommandCAD, Nickhil co-founded Timbre Technologies, a semiconductor manufacturing start-up, that won the first-ever Berkeley Business Plan competition, leading to a successful venture-backed financing. Nickhil served as CTO and VP of Marketing and Products as the company grew to become the industry standard in the field of scatterometry, before being acquired by Tokyo Electron Ltd. Nickhil remained at TEL for 3 years as Sr. Director of Technology and Marketing.

Nickhil received his M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has been the recipient of many awards from various organizations, including the IEEE Best Paper Award in the area of Transactions in Semiconductor Manufacturing for 2001, the Berkeley Distinguished Pioneer Award, the NSF and MICRO fellowships and the Most Outstanding Student award at the College of Engineering, Pune. He has been featured in several articles published in the United States and in India. He has to his credit more than 30 patents and 20 conference papers.