1985A startup nobody could mention. In the US his PhD advisor ran a company in the same field as his research and kept it quiet, because a faculty member declaring a startup was frowned upon.
1990sThe norm inverts in five or six years. By then you effectively did not get promoted unless you had a startup, or research landing inside a tech company, and the National Science Foundation began building programmes to foster exactly that. The funding agencies followed the change in status rather than causing it.
2000He lands back at IIT Madras and finds the same silence. Companies were already coming out of the laboratories there, and nobody would acknowledge them.
2002-10Sir, you have ruined my life. A research associate he had pushed into founding a robotics company, because the institute could not incubate one, arrived in his office in tears after two or three good years of orders: no father would hand over a bride without a payslip. The man married one of his employees and is still an entrepreneur.
2010The incubation policy goes through. As dean of industrial consultancy and sponsored research he rewrote the intellectual property policy, put an IP cell on campus and an incubation cell in the Research Park, whose first phase was by then built. By 2011 or 2012 all of it was legal and students and faculty started coming forward.
2012-14Entrepreneurship gets its social standing. Startup India and a run of visible successes changed a mindset that until then made a career in startups something to hide.
2015Underwater inspection robots. Four undergraduates who had won awards in underwater robotics wanted to build them; he pointed them at inspection instead, and once Tanuj had spent six months at a large automotive company and come back, the company was founded. Hundreds of dams, bridges and other submerged structures are safer for it.
TodayTwenty-four hours to a patent, six weeks to a company. Protection is filed within a day and the question of whether it was worth patenting comes afterwards; a faculty startup takes one email, no money out of pocket, and produces a registered company with a mentor, space and seed funding in four to six weeks. The administration went from risk-averse to risk-taking, and now celebrates failures as much as successes.
2040The bet he leaves you with. Japanese goods were trash to the West in the 1960s and coveted twenty years later, a Goldstar television marked you as a cheapo before Samsung and Hyundai arrived, and Chinese products were dismissed in 2000 and feared by 2020. He thinks India is the country everyone wants to buy technology from by 2040, if the tier-two and tier-three institutions each produce two or three deep-tech companies a year.
