Into management.:

About 200 people typically attend the events, held at the Sheraton Cerritos. Over dinner and cocktails, they listen to experts such as Mohan Sawhney, a top e-commerce authority who teaches at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management.Yet speeches are only part of the draw. Before and after, members engage in a flurry of networking. Budding entrepreneurs can rub elbows with angel investors and get advice from seasoned executives. Members of the group liken the personal exchanges to the Indian tradition of passing wisdom from a guru, or teacher, to the chela, or student."One of the key things we've learned in entrepreneurship is that there's nothing that encourages individuals more than getting to meet someone who has [become successful], and say, 'If he did it, I can do it,' " Qureshey said.

Added Chugh: "What makes me come back year after year is pure business learning--the stuff they don't teach you at Harvard Business School."The organization was founded at a 1992 luncheon in Silicon Valley by South Asian high-tech executives who had bumped up against various barriers during their rise to the top. With TiE, their goal is to help smooth the process for the new waves of ambitious immigrants. While the majority of TiE's members are from the Indus region (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka), there are non-Asian members.

Chapters exist in 10 U.S. cities and five in India.It's no secret that South Asians were a significant force in the U.S. technology sector long before the Internet boom and the emergence of TiE. For example, in the 1970s,Indian engineers became fixtures in the offices of IBM and Xerox. But they usually hit a ceiling blocking ascent into management.
Successful entrepreneurs such as Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1982, helped blaze a new trail. And the Internet boom, which offered a more level playing field for South Asians to strike out on their own, became a fast ticket to wealth."The dramatic shift we've seen is not so much a shift in cultural attitude but because the environment exists where a phenomenal idea can get funded," said Ahmed Ghouri, a 33-year-old anesthesiologist who co-founded San Diego-based CarPrices.com, a so-called reverse auction Web site chaired by Qureshey.Another of Qureshey's South Asian-founded start-ups, Irvine-based ConnectCom Microsystems, expects to close a round of venture capital funding of $15 million by September. ConnectCom is a semiconductor design firm that is developing high-speed silicon germanium optical transceivers for transmitting Internet data.


Gardena-based EntComm Inc., meanwhile, is believed to be the first organic TiE enterprise--all three founders met at a group function. Launched in September by Sundaresh Ramayya, Brij Mathur and Gopalakrishnan Satish, the business-to-business exchange integrates the supply chains of companies with their trading partners'. Clients include ConAgra and Universal Studios.TiE also helps start-ups find technically skilled workers, a perpetual headache for technology firms, says 1StopMD Inc.'s founder, Venkat Yepuri. His Arcadia company, which enables physicians to buy medical and office products from a single source on the Web, has hired key technical consultants thanks to TiE connections.