The $8.5B question: Is India’s CHIP MISSION working? | Insider takes from Mindgrove Technologies CEO

Unknown Host 0:00 I wanna ask you before we get into that a bit, uh, just talk to me as if I'm Gen Z. [chuckles] What does a electronics engineer do?

Shashwath T R 0:07 I'll give you a very poetic answer.

Unknown Host 0:09 Okay.

Shashwath T R 0:09 We make electrons dance, and when the electrons dance, they do useful work that, uh, really comes to the heart of modern life.

Unknown Host 0:20 Can you give me an example from your early career, like-

Shashwath T R 0:23 On the top level, you're seeing a lot of data is the new oil, and if data is the new oil, semiconductors is the oil refinery which gets the data out. You can hardly go take 10 steps today in the modern world without encountering some kind of electronics, and all of that electronics is underlied by a semiconductor somewhere, which has been manufactured.

Unknown Host 0:43 Hi, this is Amrit. We are at IIT Madras,

Unknown Host 0:45 my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: "What are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build?" [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Best Place to Build Podcast. Today, we are sitting with Shashwath. He's the CEO and co-founder of Mindgrove Technologies.

Unknown Host 1:23 It's a semiconductor startup, doing really well. Uh, their office is in the IIT Madras Research Park. I also want to tell you that this will be a little different kind of podcast because we know each other really well. Um, and, um, we are the same age, I think within a few months.

Shashwath T R 1:38 Yeah, something like that.

Unknown Host 1:39 And, and we're both dads, uh, and very involved dads, so we're gonna be cutting each other a lot. [chuckles]

Shashwath T R 1:44 [chuckles]

Unknown Host 1:44 So please bear with me. [chuckles] If on the comment section you feel like I'm cutting him off too much, then my apologies in advance. Welcome to the podcast, Shashwath.

Shashwath T R 1:54 Thank you.

Unknown Host 1:55 Shashwath, I have to ask you a question. What is the deal with semiconductors? Why has it captured everyone's

Unknown Host 2:00 attention? Before you start, I want to tell you, you are the fourth semiconductor guest. We had Sharan, we had Professor Kamakoti, we had Neil Gala, who is the co-founder of, um, Incore. And each of these podcasts, like, the highest views on our channel. [bird screeching] I don't get it. What is happening, boss? [chuckles]

Shashwath T R 2:16 [chuckles] I think... I mean, it's fun, isn't it? It's really fun to be a semiconductor engineer at this time in India. But, um, I think part of what we are seeing right now is what, uh, government has finally... I mean, government has tried it in a lot of different eras, but at this time it feels like it's really clicking, and they're putting so much time, and energy, and effort, and shoveling so much media attention towards where semiconductors is. The second thread is, uh, on the top level, you're seeing a lot of data is the new oil, and if data is the new oil, semiconductors is the oil refinery which gets the data out. AI doesn't work without semiconductors. That's the intelligence part of the artificial intelligence. But, um, there's a deeper undercurrent which is happening. You know, when we were growing up, [harp music] our cars had a mechanical carburetor, which was pushing fuel into the engine.

Unknown Host 3:14 Mm.

Shashwath T R 3:15 Uh, not our cars, our parents' cars.

Unknown Host 3:17 [chuckles] Yeah.

Shashwath T R 3:18 I don't think I've ever driven that.

Unknown Host 3:20 [chuckles]

Shashwath T R 3:20 But, uh, as it goes, right now, pretty much every vehicle started with multipoint fuel injection using a microprocessor, but now the entire powertrain, um, automatic brakes, automatic, uh, windshield wipers-

Unknown Host 3:38 Yeah

Shashwath T R 3:39 ... automatic lights.

Unknown Host 3:40 So it's like the, the carburetor has become a smart carburetor?

Shashwath T R 3:43 Yeah.

Unknown Host 3:43 The windshield wiper has become a smart-

Shashwath T R 3:45 Smart windshield wiper

Unknown Host 3:45 ... wiper. Yeah, fair enough.

Shashwath T R 3:47 And I mean, like, you can hardly go take 10 steps today in the modern world without encountering some kind of electronics, and all of that electronics is underlied by a semiconductor somewhere-

Unknown Host 4:00 Mm

Shashwath T R 4:00 ... which has been manufactured.

Unknown Host 4:02 So this could be a sensor-

Shashwath T R 4:03 Yeah

Unknown Host 4:03 ... or a microchip or a... Uh, sorry, c- can you just tell me what all could it be?

Shashwath T R 4:08 It could be a sensor, it could be a micro, uh, controller, it could be a device that takes analog signals and makes it digital. It could be a s- device which takes... Which, uh, let's say it's a transmitter, or a receiver, or a transceiver, which is both at the same time. Um, it could be a display, and most probably it is all of these things put together in one.

Unknown Host 4:32 Hmm. Very interesting. So you're saying semiconductors is hot because, uh, the government is pushing it, uh, the government attention is in it, so everybody's attention is on it. You're also saying that devices around us have become, like, digital, they have evolved, they cannot work without semiconductors today?

Shashwath T R 4:48 Yeah.

Unknown Host 4:49 So the scope has broadened.

Shashwath T R 4:52 And, um, I would say the government's interest is on it because of all of these other factors.

Unknown Host 4:57 Makes sense.

Shashwath T R 4:58 It's, it's something that is so fundamental to our, uh, underlying economy today, that, um, to our lives today, in fact-

Unknown Host 5:08 Yeah

Shashwath T R 5:08 ... that you can't escape it. And you, uh, as a big nation with ambitions and moving up, we have no choice but to go into these domains, which are critical in terms of our security and our, uh, well-being.

Unknown Host 5:25 Fair enough. The other thing you said was that semiconductors is the oil rig.

Shashwath T R 5:29 Yeah.

Unknown Host 5:30 So when people say, "This is the age of AI," it's actually the age of semiconductors.

Shashwath T R 5:33 It is.

Unknown Host 5:33 Right?

Unknown Host 5:34 And I remember the graphic that you put out, the age of semiconductors graphic that you put out when you raised your funding.

Shashwath T R 5:38 Yes. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 5:39 Very interesting. Um, Shashwath, thank you so much. We had Sharan on the podcast, uh, a year back-

Shashwath T R 5:44 Yeah

Unknown Host 5:44 ... almost similar time. Um, from then to now, your company has moved forward. So can you give... Give me an idea of what you've accomplished in the last one year. Is there an announcement? Something you can tell us? What is the next year looking like? Sorry, I'm bombarding you [chuckles] with too many questions. It feels like 10.

Shashwath T R 6:03 Uh, this one year has, uh, I wouldn't say aged, it's made us grow so much.... and it's made us, uh, move so much faster than I originally expected that things would move, um, but also slower than I hoped that things would move. But anyway, uh, we started in 2021. Um, if 2021 was the, uh, year of figuring out what to do, and 2022 was doubling down on semiconductors, 2023 was, uh, building a prototype, '23 and '24 were building a prototype. The theme for 2025 is going out into the world and growing up.

Unknown Host 6:46 Okay.

Shashwath T R 6:47 So we've done... I can't count how many customers we've met, and then we've drilled down from that into a few pilot deployments that we are, uh, trialing now, um, with the prototype chips. Uh, we are- we took a bet that the prototype chip is working well enough that we could go for mass production, and that is happening right now.

Unknown Host 7:10 Okay.

Shashwath T R 7:12 We should be hitting the shelves with chips that people can buy, um, sometime early next year.

Unknown Host 7:20 Okay. So by early 2026, your chips will actually be available on stores?

Shashwath T R 7:24 Yeah.

Unknown Host 7:24 By stores, I mean, like-

Shashwath T R 7:25 Yeah, well-

Unknown Host 7:26 I, I don't know. Where do people... Which kind of stores [chuckles] are these?

Shashwath T R 7:29 That's actually one of the interesting-

Unknown Host 7:30 Can I go to Flipkart and say, "Mindgrove chips?"

Shashwath T R 7:32 That's ac- You can actually go to Amazon and... well, not get Mindgrove chips, but you can go to Amazon and say, "I want to buy a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino."

Unknown Host 7:41 Mm.

Shashwath T R 7:41 And that's pretty much the same thing that's, that we are, right? So for the electronics engineer, there are, uh, specific portals that we use, where we typically buy chips in bulk.

Unknown Host 7:53 Okay.

Shashwath T R 7:54 The Flipkarts and Amazons of our world are, uh, slightly different. We call them Digi-Key, Mouser.

Unknown Host 8:00 Mm.

Shashwath T R 8:01 The Indian version, um, there is a company called Robo, which I'm pretty sure a lot of engineers would be familiar with.

Unknown Host 8:08 Okay, so your chips will be available there?

Shashwath T R 8:09 We will-- Our chips will eventually be available there. Initially, we expected to go into slightly higher volume, direct sales to big companies. Over the first half of the year 2026, we... I do expect that our chips will be available, our boards will be available for people to buy and try-

Unknown Host 8:29 Okay

Shashwath T R 8:29 ... on specialized e-commerce sites for electronics.

Unknown Host 8:33 Nice. Congratulations on that. Um, what I hear you say is that the production is done. You're waiting for the chips. It's coming out soon.

Shashwath T R 8:41 Yeah.

Unknown Host 8:41 You'll probably give it to your existing customers first, and then to the-

Shashwath T R 8:44 Yeah

Unknown Host 8:44 ... uh, e-commerce sites.

Shashwath T R 8:45 Yep.

Unknown Host 8:46 Uh, I want to ask you a question here. We are talking about your first chip, right?

Shashwath T R 8:49 Yes.

Unknown Host 8:49 What does your first chip do? What kind of applications are it for?

Shashwath T R 8:54 So Secure IoT is a microcontroller. At its heart is a Shakti core, which was built at Rice Lab, CS department, under Professor Kamkoti. And one of the reasons Mindgrove exists and Mindgrove is what it is today, is that whole ecosystem that evolved around the Rice Lab. But it's also a high-performance microcontroller, b- which means that it, uh... You know, let's go back to the carburettor example, right? The first programmable fuel injection that we had would read your accelerator position and the current speed of the car, and decide whether to pump in fuel or not. Um, now you're taking in all kinds of other environmental factors, and there is more data coming into that thing and more data going out. So it's reading the brake, it's reading the God knows what else. And that means that the performance requirement on that thing, which used to be, "Hey, great, we have a, uh, one megahertz chip," now it makes a lot more sense to push it up the performance chain. And, uh, uh, right now, Secure IoT is more powerful than every computer that I have used in my first twenty years of life.

Unknown Host 10:13 That's damn cool. Uh, can I just ask you for, like, from a very simplistic point of view, uh, the, the megahertz is the clock speed, right?

Shashwath T R 10:21 Yeah.

Unknown Host 10:21 So it's the speed at which it's doing computation.

Shashwath T R 10:23 Yeah.

Unknown Host 10:24 So is it fair to say that a one gigahertz chip is faster than a five hundred megahertz chip, and so on? It is, right?

Shashwath T R 10:30 To a very large extent, yes. Uh, you go in very deep tech- technically, yes, you can have a five hundred megahertz chip which performs more computation than a one gigahertz chip because it has more hardware.

Unknown Host 10:41 Okay.

Shashwath T R 10:42 Um, the megahertz is a proxy.

Unknown Host 10:45 Okay.

Shashwath T R 10:46 It's not always the best proxy.

Unknown Host 10:48 Understood. But if I want more sensors, more data, faster movement, then I need a faster chip?

Shashwath T R 10:54 Yeah.

Unknown Host 10:54 Okay. So this- that's what high performance means?

Shashwath T R 10:58 In this case, yes.

Unknown Host 10:59 Okay. So you said, uh, high-performance microcontroller-

Shashwath T R 11:04 Yeah

Unknown Host 11:04 ... Secure IoT, right? What are the applications?

Shashwath T R 11:06 It could control the carburettor, except that it's not automotive qualified. Um, that takes a while. Uh, but it was actually designed to be a secure microcontroller also, and that partly comes out of Rice Lab's, uh, focus on security in the early days. And it comes with something very unique, which, um, not totally unique, but an emerging thing in the microcontroller field, where you have security algorithms which are baked into the hardware. Um, you know, all your encryption, decryption, signing kind of algorithms. And that has become more and more necessary because, uh, that carburettor is now connected to the internet, and the last thing you want is, uh, a DDoS attack on your carburettor as you're driving down the highway at hundred miles an hour. But really think about, uh, the biometrics that let you in and out of places. Think of Aadhaar. You think of, uh, something like, uh-... point-of-sale devices. Nobody carries money anymore.

Unknown Host 12:13 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 12:14 And that chain-

Unknown Host 12:16 The soundbox.

Shashwath T R 12:17 Soundbox.

Unknown Host 12:18 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 12:18 And the chain of custody as you move money around is very important.

Unknown Host 12:25 A whole lot of other things over there where you need security.

Shashwath T R 12:28 Okay.

Unknown Host 12:28 So a lot of these secure applications, door locks have become secure. You, you put your finger to it, it reads your fingerprint, and then lets you into your house. You don't want that to be hackable to you.

Shashwath T R 12:37 Mm.

Unknown Host 12:38 So a lot of these things, um, you want all of the security in there, you want it to be fast, because nobody wants to s- spend 10 minutes waiting outside their house while the thing dials up to the internet and goes and brings data back.

Shashwath T R 12:53 Yeah.

Unknown Host 12:53 So-

Shashwath T R 12:54 I have this, uh... I have this television from 20 years back, not 20, maybe 15 years back, which has a remote where you have to press something and literally wait for the TV [chuckles] to respond.

Unknown Host 13:04 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 13:04 It's hilarious. It's from a different era, and, uh, everything else has moved.

Unknown Host 13:08 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 13:08 They respond so much faster now, right? Mm.

Unknown Host 13:12 So, a, a huge challenge for hardware engineers has been, how do you keep that performance? I don't know if you remember the first computers we worked on. You switch them on, that was it. You got to a DOS prompt, but you got to doing your work immediately.

Shashwath T R 13:28 We had this era in the middle where we had, like, 10 minutes, where we would switch it on-

Unknown Host 13:32 Yeah

Shashwath T R 13:32 ... go for a coffee, and come back.

Unknown Host 13:33 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 13:35 A huge challenge for engineers has been to get back to that instant feedback. And, uh, you know, your mobile phone today, you pick it up, you, uh, look at it, and it's ready to work.

Unknown Host 13:49 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 13:50 That has been a huge achievement of the hardware world and, and of the electronics world.

Unknown Host 13:56 Fair enough. You're saying that for that to happen, all the processing has to happen instantly-

Shashwath T R 14:00 Yeah

Unknown Host 14:00 ... at the space, at that-

Shashwath T R 14:01 Yeah

Unknown Host 14:02 ... place, all the sensors, actuators, everything has to work immediately.

Shashwath T R 14:04 Yes.

Unknown Host 14:05 I understood. Okay, so got it. Understood what... So last year, you said this 2025, you got the your chip to production. Gave me an explanation of, uh, what the chip is meant for. Shashwath, um, interesting year for you, but also interesting year for the entire globe and India for semiconductors. Can you give us a wrap of what is the most important thing in your

Unknown Host 14:27 point of view?

Shashwath T R 14:28 Sure. So there's been a vote of confidence from traditional Indian business in semiconductors. So we have Netersemi raising, uh, $10 million, with Zoho participating and Zoho leading. In fact, Agari Labs raised a seed round of $8 million, and they make GPUs.

Unknown Host 14:46 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 14:46 So that is a very ambitious thing for somebody to build from India, or so people think.

Unknown Host 14:51 Mm.

Shashwath T R 14:52 And apart from that, you're seeing a lot of the, um, manufacturing capacity starting to come online, all the... Uh, we can spend some time on the sup- supply chain later, but basically, the easiest manufacturing thing to bring online in semiconductors is what we call assembly.

Unknown Host 15:11 Okay.

Shashwath T R 15:12 And when you take a chip and you see a chip, the, uh, plastic piece that you're holding is actually a package.

Unknown Host 15:19 Okay.

Shashwath T R 15:19 The actual silicon semiconductor or the germanium semiconductor is a small piece inside. Taking that semiconductor and putting it in the plastic package with all the metal leads is a technically complex piece of engineering. It's a huge value add, and we are seeing multiple companies which started doing their manufacturing for these in India. The first was Micron. I think it was announced in '21, uh, '22. And, uh, right now, Tata's, well, Tata's coming online in Assam. CG Power's, uh, OAT is coming... OAT is, by the way, Outsource Assembly and Testing.

Unknown Host 15:58 Mm.

Shashwath T R 15:59 So CG Power's OAT is coming online, uh, Keynes is coming online, and that's the first commercial semiconductor manufacturing that we are seeing coming online in India.

Unknown Host 16:10 That's pretty-

Shashwath T R 16:10 That's really exciting.

Unknown Host 16:12 Uh, you are a DLI awardee-

Shashwath T R 16:14 Mm

Unknown Host 16:14 ... uh, the, the Design Linked Incentive scheme that the government has announced. And of course, uh, some of the manufacturing setups you mentioned are PLI awardees, uh, Production Linked Incentive scheme.

Shashwath T R 16:24 Yeah.

Unknown Host 16:24 So the government has done a lot, and we're just lucky to be in a place where-

Shashwath T R 16:29 We're just lucky to be in a place in... We're lucky to be in a country which has the wherewithal to do this, and the talent, and the need at the same time.

Unknown Host 16:39 I want to ask you one question here that I've written down, that you, you are not making the most advanced chip. You're not making AI chips-

Shashwath T R 16:44 Yeah

Unknown Host 16:44 ... you're not making GPUs. Uh, so, um, and, and you have said that you're making chips for the middle. So what does that mean? I also want to ask you, is there innovation to do in these kind of chips? Uh, isn't it a solved problem? Like-

Shashwath T R 16:59 It's one of my-

Unknown Host 17:00 You mentioned biometrics, right?

Shashwath T R 17:01 Yeah.

Unknown Host 17:01 Biometrics already exists, so...

Shashwath T R 17:04 So yes, biometrics exists. So I'll give you a very small thing over here, right? Um, biometrics exist, but you need better biometrics, you need more secure biometrics, and you need to solve for that. Sometimes that involves inventing entirely new techniques. The middle is a strategy that we chose, because if you go really down into the market, it's very hard to make something and actually make money doing it. And as a company, o- one of the main, the important things that you need to do is to make money in order to survive.

Unknown Host 17:40 Mm.

Shashwath T R 17:41 So if you go really down the market, it's very hard, the economies of scale don't kick in. But if you go really high, now, the least of your problems is technology. You have to go up against the, uh, industry majors-

Unknown Host 17:56 Mm

Shashwath T R 17:57 ... and that's a really hard proposition to take on. But on the other hand, in the middle, there's a lot of problems to solve. There's a lot of stuff that people actually want to do, and, uh, you know, just imagine, mm, you know, one of the large corporates, and there are thousands of people entering every day.... and thousands of people leaving, and everybody wants biometric access, but they don't want to sit and sign in.

Unknown Host 18:26 No.

Shashwath T R 18:26 You had fingerprints, you had, uh, ID cards, but that's too slow for the modern world.

Unknown Host 18:32 Mm.

Shashwath T R 18:33 And you need something faster.

Unknown Host 18:35 Yeah, you may want face recognition now.

Shashwath T R 18:37 Yeah. Enter a high-performance microcontroller, which is typically a middle-end chip. It used to be super high-end-

Unknown Host 18:46 Many years ago

Shashwath T R 18:46 ... 10 years ago, even. But it's middle of the road now.

Unknown Host 18:51 I get what you're saying. What you're saying is, uh, that, yes, we have had solutions before, but f- as the world is moving forward, the problem becomes more nuanced. Those solutions don't fit the modern version of the problem-

Shashwath T R 19:02 Yeah

Unknown Host 19:02 ... the problems are themselves changing.

Shashwath T R 19:04 The problems are changing. The way we can solve the problems are changing. I didn't have a 28-nanometer process 10 years ago, which I could use to make a chip like SecurIoT.

Unknown Host 19:13 Mm.

Shashwath T R 19:15 It would not have been possible to build this kind of biometrics today, I mean, as that we can today, 10 years ago.

Unknown Host 19:21 Mm. Interesting. Um, I get from a business point of view that, that it- you're saying that these problems exist, you need better solutions, so there's an existing business, uh, to be had, and, uh, that's the goal of a business, is to make money first-

Shashwath T R 19:37 Yeah

Unknown Host 19:37 ... and survive and grow. But when you go to an investor and you say, "I'm making for the middle, I'm not making for the cutting edge," how do you convince people to invest in you? Like, won't they just prefer to invest in a company which is working on the edge?

Shashwath T R 19:52 So you have to find the right investor. Um, you have... or rather, very specifically, you have to find an investor who is on your wavelength.

Unknown Host 20:00 Mm.

Shashwath T R 20:01 We're very lucky that there are investors on our wavelength whom we can talk to-

Unknown Host 20:06 Mm

Shashwath T R 20:06 ... and who understood the idea of the mass market and the volume that we can build by building for the middle. And a lot of the strategy that we have is also done in collaboration in, in, uh, conversation with our investors.

Unknown Host 20:22 Okay.

Shashwath T R 20:23 So how do we position ourselves? How do we position our products? And we've been very lucky in our investors, starting with the IIT Madras, actually. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 20:32 Yeah, IIT Madras was your first investor.

Shashwath T R 20:33 Yes.

Unknown Host 20:34 And then I, I see that you have the cream. You have Speciale invest on your board, you have, um, Rocketship VC-

Shashwath T R 20:41 Yes

Unknown Host 20:41 ... uh, which is a global investor, and you have Peak XV.

Shashwath T R 20:44 [chuckles]

Unknown Host 20:44 Um, it's amazing. Thank you. Uh, thank you for that, uh, sort of, uh, perspective. I'm wondering, um, we, we, we use the word great middle very loosely.

Shashwath T R 20:55 Yeah.

Unknown Host 20:56 But what are the applications we are talking of? You, you spoke of biometrics, and you said maybe some automotive use case, but what, what else? And, and not just your first chip, but-

Shashwath T R 21:04 Yeah

Unknown Host 21:04 ... over your next few chips, what is the strategy?

Shashwath T R 21:07 So the next chip that we are building is a camera chip, and, uh, we saw one of the news roundup of the year is that we saw a lot of use cases coming up from the Indian industry, the most important of which is CCTVs. And that blew up sometime, uh, in the middle of the year, and Government of India's, uh, doubled down and said, "Okay, now everybody needs to... Uh, all CCTVs need to be much more secure. We should not be leaking our, uh, most intimate data of our daily lives to other countries, so we need a lot more security. We need a lot more, uh, certification to go into this." And the CCTV manufacturers had just been merely importing stuff and selling it-

Unknown Host 21:55 Mm

Shashwath T R 21:55 ... um, which made sense.

Unknown Host 21:57 No, I, I, I was just reading about this a few-

Shashwath T R 21:59 Mm

Unknown Host 21:59 ... days back, and I realized that the, the, of course, the government, uh, pushes CCTVs in many directions.

Shashwath T R 22:07 Yeah.

Unknown Host 22:08 But I was looking at traffic CCTVs, and I realized that the biggest push for traffic CCTVs came after the Nirbhaya incident in, uh-

Shashwath T R 22:16 Yeah

Unknown Host 22:16 ... I think 2012, '13, whatever, uh, that period.

Shashwath T R 22:19 Yeah.

Unknown Host 22:19 And then the Delhi government said that we are going to, you know, flood the city with-

Shashwath T R 22:24 Yeah

Unknown Host 22:24 ... uh, traffic cams.

Shashwath T R 22:26 Yeah.

Unknown Host 22:26 And from there, of course, we didn't have any manufacturing capacity, whatever, so everything is imported, which is what you're saying.

Shashwath T R 22:31 Mm. Everything was imported first.

Unknown Host 22:33 Okay.

Shashwath T R 22:33 And then they started bringing in little bits of manufacturing inside-

Unknown Host 22:36 Okay

Shashwath T R 22:37 ... and then more. And now we've come to the point where if we really want to scale beyond this, uh, if we want to bring all the other features that we want, we really have to start bringing the design in.

Unknown Host 22:48 Okay. Because the, the, the, the core design is still imported?

Shashwath T R 22:53 Yeah.

Unknown Host 22:53 Maybe the pieces are put together here.

Shashwath T R 22:55 Yeah. And sometimes what happens is the design is done here, uh, parts are made outside, and then parts are brought here and assembled. So we have a kind of a very back-and-forth kind of an ecosystem, and consolidating that makes a lot of sense from a business case. But more than that, now you have, uh, a lot of tailwind in terms of government coming back and saying that, "We want all of the security on the CCTV itself."

Unknown Host 23:20 Mm.

Shashwath T R 23:21 And, mm, so ton- terabytes of data being transmitted up and down these CCTV links. Do we really want to be doing that? And then there is this one poor guy sitting in a control center somewhere, whose job is to stare at the CCTV for eight hours a day and hopefully catch something. That's not what we want. We want to bring some kind of intelligence into that system.

Unknown Host 23:43 I have always thought about that. I've always wondered, why can't, in a control room... You see in movies, you know, somebody's sitting and watching these-

Shashwath T R 23:50 Yeah

Unknown Host 23:50 ... eight CCTV cameras or whatever, 15 CCTV cameras. Um, why can't the CCTV camera do the image processing and just, you know, have alerts?

Shashwath T R 24:00 Yeah. And that's literally what we are building towards. It all makes sense.

Unknown Host 24:04 Okay.

Shashwath T R 24:05 But very often what happens now is it comes to a central server, and the server does that stuff. A little bit more intelligence at the edge, so you don't even have to transmit the data if it's not an alert.

Unknown Host 24:18 Mm.

Shashwath T R 24:19 That makes a difference.

Unknown Host 24:20 Correct. Now I get it.

Shashwath T R 24:22 ... it was a solved problem, then the problem moved.

Unknown Host 24:25 Yes.

Shashwath T R 24:25 And now you have to solve it again.

Unknown Host 24:27 Yes.

Shashwath T R 24:27 Got it. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 24:29 Okay, so, so I get a sense, uh, biometrics, CCTV, I think you spoke about meters-

Shashwath T R 24:35 Yeah

Unknown Host 24:36 ... uh, stuff like that. So a lo- lot of the middle grade thing, and maybe you mentioned automotive in the middle?

Shashwath T R 24:41 I, I mentioned automotive. Um, we've taken

Shashwath T R 24:45 to saying that we make no secret of the fact that Mindgrove wants to go up to the auto- automotive world.

Unknown Host 24:49 Mm. In each of these segments, actually, global giants exist, right?

Shashwath T R 24:53 Yeah.

Unknown Host 24:53 Do we have a chance to actually build a global giant microcontroller company from... microprocessor company from India?

Shashwath T R 24:59 Yes, we do. Because I think, um, it's a lot to do with, uh, meeting the needs of the industry. Intel was never- Intel didn't start off as a giant, did it?

Unknown Host 25:16 Intel was a startup.

Shashwath T R 25:17 Intel was a startup at some point in time.

Unknown Host 25:18 Yeah. I mean, Apple was a startup.

Shashwath T R 25:20 Apple was a startup. And Intel, even as a giant, even at the peak of Intel's power, right in the mid-2000s, they were not able to make the mobile phone world work.

Unknown Host 25:32 Mm.

Shashwath T R 25:33 And you had, uh, companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek coming in and building the processors that... And, of course, Apple decided that they were not going to rely on anybody else and build their own processors. So you have a lot of, um, churn in the processor industry. The big, uh, competition to Intel in the early days was Motorola. Mm, Motorola doesn't exist anymore in the processor world. So the story of semiconductors is a lot of churn, startups coming in, becoming big, getting acquired, or acquiring other companies, churning. So that is typically what happens in the semiconductor industry.

Unknown Host 26:21 But all the names you mentioned are not Indian, so that's-

Shashwath T R 26:24 All the names I mentioned are not Indian.

Unknown Host 26:25 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 26:27 Only now we have Indian companies trying to become giants in this field.

Unknown Host 26:31 Mm.

Shashwath T R 26:31 Understood.

Unknown Host 26:33 Shashwath, just dialing back a bit, uh, you, you by training and by your career experience, you're not a semiconductor person, you're a electronics engineer.

Shashwath T R 26:42 Yeah.

Unknown Host 26:42 So I wanna ask you, before we get into that a bit, uh, just talk to me as if I'm Gen Z. [chuckles] What

Unknown Host 26:48 does a electronics engineer do?

Shashwath T R 26:49 I'll give you a very poetic answer.

Unknown Host 26:51 Okay.

Shashwath T R 26:52 We make electrons dance, and when the electrons dance, they do useful work that, uh, really comes to the heart of modern life.

Unknown Host 27:03 Can you give me an example from your early career? Like, first-

Shashwath T R 27:05 Sure

Unknown Host 27:05 ... two, three years of your career, what would you have worked on?

Shashwath T R 27:08 So, um, I did a lot of ultrasound in my early career.

Unknown Host 27:12 Ultrasound machines?

Shashwath T R 27:13 Ultrasound machines. Uh, I did a lot of the algorithmic side of the ultrasound, signal processing, and at one point, I got involved in the actual work of building ultrasound devices.

Unknown Host 27:25 Okay.

Shashwath T R 27:26 And, uh, if you think about it, right, um, you take this device, it's a probe, which is connected to this other big device, which is the, uh, the machine, and you keep it, let's say, on somebody's abdomen, and you're take... trying to take an image. What is actually happening over here is that, um, the way this works, there's a tiny little piezoelectric crystal at the, um... or an array of these piezoelectric crystals at the edge of that probe, at the front face of that probe, and you need to make it vibrate, which sends vibrations down into whatever you're observing, and those vibrations reflect on something and come back.

Unknown Host 28:05 Mm. That's how ultrasounds work.

Shashwath T R 28:07 That's how ultrasounds work, right? The challenge here is that you will have to put in hundreds of volts to make that thing move, and that goes into the, let's say, a person. I did a lot of stuff on mechanical devices, but then the principle is the same. And then what you get back after all the waves die down inside the, uh, medium, and then they get reflected and come back, you get millivolts.

Unknown Host 28:33 Mm. So it's a very weak signal?

Shashwath T R 28:35 It's a very weak signal that you get back. So a very strong signal going in, and a very weak signal coming back. Now, you have to design a system which can produce that kind of power, shove it into this thing, very precise timing intervals, send it into the, uh, medium, bring it back, and then measure millivolts out of the same device. And you have to protect the operator and the patient from all of that high power. You have to still measure that low signal, that weak signal, and then you have to create an image out of it.

Unknown Host 29:16 Understood. So it's not enough to say, "I'm just using vibration of-

Shashwath T R 29:20 Yeah

Unknown Host 29:20 ... electromagnetic waves," but just taking that physical-

Shashwath T R 29:22 In this case, acoustic waves, but yeah.

Unknown Host 29:24 I'm sorry. [laughing] Acoustic waves.

Shashwath T R 29:29 [laughing] Acoustic waves, uh, but w- what... The right way of saying it is that the- to make this actually happen, there's a lot of electronics that has to be built.

Unknown Host 29:37 Yes.

Shashwath T R 29:38 And, and at a, at a early career, you would be thinking of how to get the mechanics of it, the-

Unknown Host 29:42 Yeah

Shashwath T R 29:43 ... [chuckles] electronics of it.

Unknown Host 29:44 Sure, the mechanics of it actually works because you're thinking of the mechanics of how signal flows-

Shashwath T R 29:50 Mm

Unknown Host 29:50 ... and how power flows, and you're choosing components, you're choosing connectors, because every connector you choose, for example, could change the characteristics of the signal.

Shashwath T R 30:00 Mm.

Unknown Host 30:00 Every, uh, device you choose.

Shashwath T R 30:03 And as you get further and further, you, you might find that there is one particular, let's say, chip, which is the most perfect thing for you to use for that particular use case, but then it's not available.

Unknown Host 30:15 Okay.

Shashwath T R 30:17 That was kind of my, uh, story f- mm, jumping back and forth a bit. That was part of the story as to why we decided to build Mindgrove.... because we were looking for a chip that was-- if there was a perfect chip, it wasn't available, and if there was a chip that was available, it wasn't really suited for the purpose of what we wanted to build. So we just decided to throw it and build the chip as we know how to do it.

Unknown Host 30:40 Interesting. I want to ask you a question here. Uh, electronics engineers start by doing the circuitry work-

Shashwath T R 30:46 Yeah

Unknown Host 30:47 ... on processors, uh, and as they grow, how does that role change?

Shashwath T R 30:52 At every level, a large portion of your day will be spent debugging and figuring out why something didn't work, right? And as you progress, you start doing a lot more, um, supply chain-related work. You start doing a lot more, uh, spec-driven work. You start dreaming up entire devices and trying to think of how they would be manufactured. You sit and talk to customers, right? Um, I spent so much time sitting in, uh, random factories and, uh, uh, workshops trying to see what their actual problem was and what device... Do I need to build a new device to solve this problem? Do I need to build a new algorithms to solve this problem with an existing device? And my career is a little, um, eclectic in that sense. I have done everything from, like I said, pushing el- electrons back and forth, to writing top-level GUI code-

Unknown Host 31:56 Mm.

Shashwath T R 31:57 ... code, uh, web code, and all of it in the same project.

Unknown Host 32:01 Nice. Very interesting. So, uh, I want to... I want-- I'm seeing this drawing in front of me. It's the, uh-- it says here, "Pinegrove Silicon v2.6.0.1," and it looks like a lot of blocks. So at what point of time in my electronics engineering career, I don't have one, but-

Shashwath T R 32:16 Mm

Unknown Host 32:16 ... suppose I had, would I be able to read a block like this? And can you just, like-

Shashwath T R 32:20 Very early [chuckles]

Unknown Host 32:20 ... explain to me what am I supposed to read here?

Shashwath T R 32:22 Sure. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 32:22 Like, to me, it looks like squares-

Shashwath T R 32:26 Sure

Unknown Host 32:26 ... and rectangles.

Shashwath T R 32:27 So this is an upcoming chip that we're building.

Unknown Host 32:29 Mm.

Shashwath T R 32:29 Right? And, uh, to your, uh, to your question, I think very early in your career, you learn to read these things because they're the bread and butter of what we do.

Unknown Host 32:37 Okay.

Shashwath T R 32:38 So it tells you what is on the chip.

Unknown Host 32:42 Okay.

Shashwath T R 32:42 In this case, on the chip, but then it could be a subsystem which is made up of multiple chips. Um, there is the core complex, which is, uh, Shakti Core, that is Phi Core. Um, in this case, it is-

Unknown Host 32:56 Don't go into too much details.

Shashwath T R 32:57 Yeah.

Unknown Host 32:57 I won't understand. Just give me broad.

Shashwath T R 32:59 In this case, it has four cores, and then there is a multimedia and communication subsystem, which tells you how it interacts with cameras and displays.

Unknown Host 33:06 Okay.

Shashwath T R 33:07 There is, uh... Um, you look at it, you see that there is memory, and how-- what kind of memory do I need to provision to use this chip?

Unknown Host 33:14 Okay.

Shashwath T R 33:15 What kind of other devices can it con- connect to? This is the first thing that we look at when we evaluate whether the chip is suited for a purpose.

Unknown Host 33:25 There's... A electronics engineer would look at-

Shashwath T R 33:26 Yeah

Unknown Host 33:27 ... uh, a, a circuit designer would look.

Shashwath T R 33:28 Yes.

Unknown Host 33:29 Okay.

Shashwath T R 33:30 And then you look at what... Having chosen this chip, what do I need to do to actually solve the problem? What other devices, what other chips do I need to buy and put on this board? This is one of the first things that we do. And then we start building circuit diagrams, and we start building schematics, which connect chips together. And then you lay out those on a PCB. Very often, early in your career, you will not be touching the PCB. You'll be doing things on breadboards or prototype boards, um, just connecting PCBs together. But I think, uh, one of the early aha moments for me was when I first designed a PCB.

Unknown Host 34:12 Okay.

Shashwath T R 34:13 And, uh, a lot of the headaches that you face while doing prototyping just go away when you're doing a PCB, but then the cost of doing a PCB is much higher. So you want to have a lot of basics ironed out before you go there.

Unknown Host 34:26 Understood. So early in your career, you would, uh, you would sort of work on a breadboard, try to figure out components, try to build a circuit-

Shashwath T R 34:31 Yeah

Unknown Host 34:32 ... then you'd move on to actually prototyping it on a PCB. You'd start reading these diagrams early on. At what point can I design something like this?

Shashwath T R 34:41 I think the opportunity to design something like this, uh, today is much higher than it used to be.

Unknown Host 34:47 Okay.

Shashwath T R 34:48 You know, when I became an engineer, um, when I was learning engineering, uh, in college, you had, uh, you didn't have e-commerce websites in which you could buy microchips.

Unknown Host 35:00 Mm-hmm.

Shashwath T R 35:01 You, uh-

Unknown Host 35:02 You had to go to Ritchie Street. Is that still a thing?

Shashwath T R 35:05 It's still a thing.

Unknown Host 35:06 Okay.

Shashwath T R 35:07 Uh, my engineers still go to Ritchie Street to buy stuff. I don't... Thankfully, I don't have to go anymore. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 35:11 Mm-hmm.

Shashwath T R 35:12 But, um, you had to go on to these, uh... You had to do a lot of work with data sheets and then, you know, draw a block diagram and hope it worked. [chuckles] Uh, you had a restricted number of stuff in school and college labs, uh, which you could use to start prototyping. It was not always available to you. The more expensive equipment was, uh, behind lock and key.

Unknown Host 35:38 Mm-hmm.

Shashwath T R 35:40 And it was just around the time that, uh, I graduated, that you had these-- uh, you had open hardware coming in, and that was the biggest change. When open hardware came in, you could buy stuff off the internet-

Unknown Host 35:54 Mm

Shashwath T R 35:55 ... get it delivered, and start rapidly prototyping. Arduino was-

Unknown Host 35:59 Like Raspberry Pi and-

Shashwath T R 36:01 Raspberry Pi, Arduino. Um, there were a couple of, uh, forays before that, but then these were the big ones where it really changed. So you could just plug it in with the USB, uh, open up, um, uh, development environment, write a program for it. There were built sensor kits available, which you could just plug into it and, uh, do all kinds of stuff. I think a lot of, um, the way that people started to design really blew up at that point.... I recently read, uh, LinkedIn articles by, uh, veteran electronics engineers who are, uh, bemoaning the fact that all these people, all these, uh, young whippersnappers only know how to do Arduino code. But I think that's a positive. At least, I mean, like, people are getting a lot of skill. People are getting a lot of exposure to the way that, uh, these things work. And, you know, you can get to a solution much faster. You can iterate so, on solutions much faster with these tools that we have today.

Unknown Host 37:06 From when you graduated, few years after that, all these platforms came in-

Shashwath T R 37:10 Yeah

Unknown Host 37:10 ... people could experiment a lot more, learn much faster, and all that. Um, has that happened? Uh, now, now that AI has come in, how has it affected the life of an electronics engineer?

Shashwath T R 37:22 At a very fundamental level, I would say, I don't know. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 37:25 Because you're no longer... Is it, is it-

Shashwath T R 37:27 No. I mean, uh,

Shashwath T R 37:30 I, uh, I really enjoy doing stuff with my hands, so I still spend some time at least every month, if not every day anymore, doing stuff.

Unknown Host 37:40 Mm.

Shashwath T R 37:41 Uh, as a lead- uh, as somebody in the leadership position, typically, what I do doesn't, uh, reach production. It shouldn't, because my stuff is a lot sloppier than it used to be.

Unknown Host 37:56 Right.

Shashwath T R 37:56 But, um-

Unknown Host 37:57 'Cause now you're not, you're not the engineer on the project, you're the-

Shashwath T R 38:00 Yeah. I'm the guy who's telling the engineer what to do, but then I need to know what to do to tell them, so I still spend some time playing with, uh, electronics, playing with software every now and then.

Unknown Host 38:13 Okay.

Shashwath T R 38:14 But, um, I don't know, because it's still a very, very fast-changing field. And at a very fundamental level, we are still seeing a lot of things changing. You know, uh, one of the things that happened is tools became smarter, and not just now, have been becoming smarter. I grew up with these cathode-ray oscilloscopes, which required, uh, well, let's just call it percussive maintenance-

Unknown Host 38:40 Mm

Shashwath T R 38:40 ... to make them work. And you had to stare at it and, uh, you know, twiddle a dial to get something, and then, um, squint at it enough and it looks like the signal you're looking for. But now you have oscilloscopes which are effectively small compute- not effectively, they are small computers. The last oscilloscope we bought, um, boots Windows, and you plug it into the device, uh, into the system under test, press a button. It'll, uh, analyse the signal that's going on in the protocol, let's say Ethernet or USB, and it'll break down the protocol into chunks and tell you what is going on, and it'll actually point out to the problem. And you're gonna see a lot more of that. You're gonna see a lot more of people, um, you know, iterating with a copilot. The open hardware, uh, movement is actually fueling that because there's a lot for those copilots to learn from. And I'm seeing a lot of initial forays, but I don't know how that's gonna turn out.

Unknown Host 39:45 Very interesting. So electronics engineers today have to can prototype much faster, and now also they have a copilot, so they can actually code and-

Shashwath T R 39:53 Yeah

Unknown Host 39:53 ... move much faster on everything.

Shashwath T R 39:55 And, you know, um, is that jumping a little bit into VLSI? We keep billions of... I mean, our devices have billions of transistors these days, and nobody keeps that in their heads, right? Billions of transistors, uh, gets done by effectively programming an design automation tool, effectively a CAD tool. You program the tool and have it do the circuit, right? And that's programming. That looks a lot like software engineering. And a lot of people have been experimenting with copilots in doing that kind of stuff. We don't know where it's going to lead yet because it's very early days.

Unknown Host 40:38 Mm.

Shashwath T R 40:39 The data is not yet in. But a lot of people are experimenting with it.

Unknown Host 40:43 Yeah, it's an exciting time to be a semiconductor engineer or electronics engineer. I mean, of course, the government is pushing it-

Shashwath T R 40:48 Yeah

Unknown Host 40:49 ... the industry is rising, more money

Unknown Host 40:50 is coming in-

Shashwath T R 40:50 Yep

Unknown Host 40:51 ... more opportunities. Um, I want to ask you, what are the skills-- s- supposing somebody, uh, now, even mid-career, not just early career, wants to enter semiconductor space broadly, what are the skills that are required?

Shashwath T R 41:05 Um, you know, the soft skill that's required is a lot of curiosity because, um, it's a really vast field, and you need to learn a reasonably substantial portion of it to be effective, especially mid-career, like I did. Even early career, the faster you can learn more stuff, uh, the more easily you can contribute.

Unknown Host 41:25 Mm. Okay.

Shashwath T R 41:27 Uh, you need to learn a lot of electron-- The most fundamental skill that you need to learn is electronic devices: how a transistor works, what transistor to use for what, how the logic gates work. Uh, if you're going into digital, it's logic gates; if you're going into analog, it's just the transistor itself, resistors, capacitors. What we used to do on a breadboard level or a PCB level, it's just getting shrunk. And a lot of the hand-holding is done by the tools that we have.

Unknown Host 42:00 So you need to know the tools.

Shashwath T R 42:01 You need to know the tools, for sure. So learning the underlying processes, learning what's going on under- underneath the hood of the tools, I think is very important.

Unknown Host 42:11 Okay, understood. So curiosity, I'm writing this down. Curiosity, and of course, you... on the side, you mentioned that you need to know the tools, and you need hard skills of electronics.

Shashwath T R 42:20 Yes. What else? What else? What else? You need-- I think beyond that, a lot of trial and error, and, uh, the willingness to fail, because it can be very unforgiving. A circuit either boots or it doesn't, right? And a, uh, chip either boots or it doesn't.... and the willingness to take a risk.

Unknown Host 42:43 Hmm.

Shashwath T R 42:44 The willingness to fail is a skill that we had to develop.

Unknown Host 42:49 It's so interesting that you say it. I feel like Sharon also spoke about it, and Neil Gala also spoke about-

Shashwath T R 42:53 Yeah

Unknown Host 42:53 -the idea of, you know, failing and getting up and whatever. Very interesting. Um, it must be a traumatic experience that the community has [chuckles] -

Shashwath T R 43:03 [chuckles]

Unknown Host 43:04 -to switch on a circuit and not have it boot.

Shashwath T R 43:06 It is.

Unknown Host 43:06 Okay.

Shashwath T R 43:07 And, uh, I think it did stop at-

Unknown Host 43:09 Shared trauma. [chuckles]

Shashwath T R 43:10 It's a, it's a shared trauma that I wish more people would talk about, because they end up... I see a lot of people in-- Anytime three semiconductor engineers get together, uh, they go off into a corner and they talk about how many, uh, um... We call it a re-respin, when a chip goes out and it has to be, uh, redone. So you can just imagine the terror when you are, uh, sending out something. This is not like software, where you compile it, you run it, and you know it works-

Unknown Host 43:43 Mm.

Shashwath T R 43:44 -or it doesn't work.

Unknown Host 43:44 Mm.

Shashwath T R 43:45 Right? You compile it, run it, you do all the tests, and you build the file for manufacturing.

Unknown Host 43:52 Mm-hmm.

Shashwath T R 43:52 It's not even like you're 3D printing. At most, you get an answer in two to three days.

Unknown Host 43:57 Yeah, here you're sending to Taiwan, and you have to wait for them.

Shashwath T R 44:00 You have to wait for, like, three months, and then you have the packaging time, and then it comes back, and the board is being designed in the interim, and then you hope, you pray, that the board works. Then you come and plonk a chip on it, and then it doesn't boot. Terror, right? [chuckles]

Unknown Host 44:14 Yeah, I can imagine.

Shashwath T R 44:16 I mean, that happened to us the first time it came back. The chip came back, it didn't boot. It took us two weeks to start seeing a flicker of life, and then you're sitting and debugging. Was it a mistake on the chip? The first terror is always, "Oh, I made a mistake on the chip." But then you have to have this... Oh, this is another skill that you can think of. You have to have the tenacity to say, "No, let's just take this one by one, step by step. Go systematically." It's most probably not a mistake in the chip, because you went through all of the tests. So run the simulation again, give it the actual input that you're giving it, see if it's changing, and, uh, you know, correlate it with what you're seeing. What do you expect to see?

Unknown Host 45:03 Shashwath, the kind of patience and tenacity and the perseverance that this requires, doesn't it put off a lot of students, um, young people who want to join engineering, who want to join electronics or semiconductors, long cycles?

Shashwath T R 45:17 Yeah.

Unknown Host 45:18 Um, h-how do you convince people to join you, for example?

Shashwath T R 45:22 I think, again, just look around us, right? Formula One car. You have a rocket.

Unknown Host 45:27 I've been corrected. That's not a Formula One car, it's a Formula student car.

Shashwath T R 45:30 Student car. Sure. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 45:31 [chuckles]

Shashwath T R 45:32 Formula E, formula student, whatever you want to call it. I, I have an oscilloscope actually sitting behind me, and I noticed earlier it's broken.

Unknown Host 45:40 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 45:41 Um, you have a Hyperloop over here. The tangible aspect... I, I'm a very tangible person. I, I, I love working with my hands, and just the feeling after going through all of the struggle of holding your chip in your hand, the thing that you spent so much time building, and then seeing it work-

Unknown Host 46:01 Mm.

Shashwath T R 46:02 Um, that is-

Unknown Host 46:04 There's something magical about that.

Shashwath T R 46:05 Yeah, that's, that's unbeatable.

Unknown Host 46:07 Mm.

Shashwath T R 46:08 And, uh, it's not always this terror. It's not always this very long cycle. You, you have these small wins through the process, which you can say, "Oh, you know what? I just got to, um, all the simulations work, and I know..." One of the things that we try to build is, "I know that this thing will work when it goes to manufacturing."

Unknown Host 46:31 You're saying that the wins are magical-

Shashwath T R 46:35 Yes

Unknown Host 46:35 ... and out-outpace the losses or the struggles?

Shashwath T R 46:40 Yeah. And also, it is becoming a lot more democratized now. There is this, um, whole tiny tape out, fabless movement. fabless was a company which went under, but then they, uh... the founders rebranded and came up again, wherein they aggregate a lot of student design or, uh, early entrepreneurial design and take it to tape out, take it to foundry, build the chips, and bring it back. You'll get 10 chips. You'll get 100 chips. It doesn't cost as much. Uh, it is within-

Unknown Host 47:10 Nice

Shashwath T R 47:10 ... the, uh, ability of a student to do it. It's a really brilliant project. You're exercising everything that you learned.

Unknown Host 47:20 Very nice. Did you imagine... When you were in college, did you imagine that, um, the places where we live, Bangalore, Chennai... I, I think we're the same age, right? So 2003, '04, '05.

Shashwath T R 47:31 Yeah.

Unknown Host 47:31 Uh, did you imagine at that time that Indian semiconductor electronics industry would grow, would mushroom, uh, in the cities where we are working?

Shashwath T R 47:41 Yeah.

Unknown Host 47:41 You know, like the TI, NI, NXP. I don't know if it is. Qualcomm for sure, uh, Intel for sure has offices in-

Shashwath T R 47:48 Mm. Yeah-

Unknown Host 47:49 ... South India

Shashwath T R 47:49 ... and, um, I think, uh, a visit to college that I did when I was in, um, uh, visit to Bangalore I did when I was in college, I remember seeing NVIDIA had an office in India. Very early, right? Uh, NVIDIA has only started in the '90s, and we're talking about in the early 2000s. One of the earliest places that they came out was in India. I remember being very disappointed soon after that, to see that the [chuckles] electronics industry in India had not taken off.

Unknown Host 48:19 Mm.

Shashwath T R 48:19 We had seen... Uh, I think we went through college in a very hopeful time for the industry, and we saw that... We thought that it would take off immediately, but it didn't. But, mm, I always-

Unknown Host 48:32 Why, though?

Shashwath T R 48:33 Uh, I think we took a detour through the whole, um, service industry-

Unknown Host 48:39 Oh, fair enough.

Shashwath T R 48:40 Service-

Unknown Host 48:40 Yeah, and-

Shashwath T R 48:40 And then we came back.

Unknown Host 48:41 The services industry grew-... and pull talent very fast.

Shashwath T R 48:47 It pulled talent, and I think it was fair-

Unknown Host 48:48 And capital also.

Shashwath T R 48:49 And I think it was fair, because there was a business need, there was a market opportunity, there were people with real problems to be solved in that side.

Unknown Host 48:56 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 48:57 And, uh, I won't blame anybody for taking that route.

Unknown Host 49:01 Mm.

Shashwath T R 49:02 But what that meant was that we had, um, a kind of a lull for a while in Indian electronics, and it just had to pick up late 2010s.

Unknown Host 49:15 Mm.

Shashwath T R 49:16 We just had to start re-

Unknown Host 49:18 Re-

Shashwath T R 49:19 -learning a lot of the things that we already knew.

Unknown Host 49:21 Right. Fair enough. The talent was always there, and we were obviously-- Indian engineers were joining these companies. If they're here, then who was joining them, right? But you're saying that from an innovation perspective, uh, we had to wait for a while.

Shashwath T R 49:34 Hmm, we had to wait... I, I think we didn't have to wait for a while, it just turned out that we waited for a while.

Unknown Host 49:39 Mm-hmm. Okay. Nice. Damn interesting. I now live in Bangalore.

Shashwath T R 49:45 Yeah.

Unknown Host 49:45 Uh, and I don't know where the NVIDIA office is, but I do feel like when I'm going around, I do see, uh, the buses, and then the-

Shashwath T R 49:53 Yeah

Unknown Host 49:53 ... and sometimes the buildings of all these companies: Intel, Samsung. It's remarkable, because I had never imagined that all these companies would be here,

Unknown Host 50:00 where they are.

Shashwath T R 50:01 Well, and they were always there. That's the fun part, right? [chuckles] We didn't know that they were there, but they were there.

Unknown Host 50:07 Yeah. We are the same age, uh, and, uh, we're both Millennials. We both, uh, lived through the '90s, and, uh, I know from our, our conversations that we've somewhat similar interests. I'm very eager to know how, uh, you were as a child, and what are your influences early on that led you down this path of electronics, and now semiconductors, and now running a startup? [laughing]

Shashwath T R 50:31 [chuckles] Oh, all of it really comes from the same places, right? Uh, the close friends and family that I had when I was growing up. Um, my dad is not a techie, but he was very tech-adjacent. And, uh, you know, he's a lawyer, and a lot of his clients were techies or tech entrepreneurs or tech founders, and they would walk into his of- office and walk out saying, "This guy's more tech than I am," because he always has these, like, multiple screens. He has a monitor which he attaches to, to his computer, and then he has a, uh, a third monitor, which he screen shares.

Unknown Host 51:07 You're talking about your father, who's a lawyer-

Shashwath T R 51:09 My father, who's a lawyer

Unknown Host 51:10 ... with monitors? Okay.

Shashwath T R 51:11 And, uh, like, he has a client in front of him. He gives him a, uh, iPad to read it on, and he's simultaneously editing it here. He was very disappointed in me.

Unknown Host 51:21 [chuckles]

Shashwath T R 51:21 Uh, the reason he was disappointed-

Unknown Host 51:22 Become a lawyer.

Shashwath T R 51:23 He is very disappointed in me, not because I didn't become a lawyer. He's- perfectly understands that. But, um, he, uh, he keeps telling me: "You... I made you an electronics engineer, and you can't even solve this simple problem for me." And his simple problem is this: "In my bedroom, I have an AC, a fan, and a window.

Unknown Host 51:43 Mm.

Shashwath T R 51:44 I want you to build a device which will automatically sense that the temperature is at a particular place, switch off the AC, switch on the fan, and open the window." [laughing]

Unknown Host 51:55 [laughing]

Shashwath T R 51:57 "Oh, why aren't you doing this?" I'm like: "Dad, I'm building a semiconductor company." "Yeah.

Unknown Host 52:03 Mm.

Shashwath T R 52:03 That doesn't scan."

Unknown Host 52:04 That's, that's fair. You're saying that, uh... Am I right in thinking that what you're saying is that your dad was a very curious person, very-

Shashwath T R 52:11 Yeah, a very tinkery person.

Unknown Host 52:13 Sort of nerdy.

Shashwath T R 52:14 Yeah. My granddad was the same. Um, I remember sitting and disassembling old, uh, two-stroke engines with him.

Unknown Host 52:21 Oh, really?

Shashwath T R 52:22 Yeah. Um, he had those things sitting on his balcony. Uh, so I was very engineering-adjacent. Dad, who was, uh, independent, never worked... I mean, he, he did work for somebody for a few years, but then he started his own, uh, practice. Granddads never worked for anybody.

Unknown Host 52:42 Nice.

Shashwath T R 52:42 Uh-

Unknown Host 52:42 So not only were they tinkerers, they were also entrepreneurial.

Shashwath T R 52:45 In some sense or the other.

Unknown Host 52:47 Mm.

Shashwath T R 52:48 And, uh, I married into a family which is very entrepreneurial. Mm, which is, um, my wife runs her own practice. She, she's an architect.

Unknown Host 52:57 Okay.

Shashwath T R 52:57 And-

Unknown Host 52:58 So is it-

Shashwath T R 52:59 Everybody around me is like that.

Unknown Host 53:00 Okay, okay. So it's fair to say that, uh, when you quit your job and started up, nobody was disappointed, or in fact, they would've been really happy, right?

Shashwath T R 53:07 Yeah. I mean, like, I think for 10 years before I quit my job to start Mindgrove, I knew that I was going to go quit my job and start something-

Unknown Host 53:17 Yeah

Shashwath T R 53:17 ... and that that something would have- would be very engineering and tech-adjacent. I didn't know what it was. In fact, I knew what it was only after starting Mindgrove.

Unknown Host 53:28 How did you quit your job, and how did you decide to start?

Shashwath T R 53:31 Well, like I said, I was always looking for problems to solve, where I could start a company. And, uh, it just so happened, pandemic, Sharon and I are sitting at home, chatting three times a day because we were bored. I had a nearly one-year-old at that time.

Unknown Host 53:49 Mm.

Shashwath T R 53:50 And, um, you know, my day was spent between, uh, taking care of him, doing the little bit of work that was coming out of the company at that time, and, uh, thinking of what to do next. The other person we had a lot of conversations at that time was Professor Kamakoti, and, uh, a couple of other people in the field. At one point, we just said, "To hell with it, we'll start." And so early '21, we started. There was this little lull between one lockdown and another lockdown, where I started, and then there was another lockdown. We weren't able to do much. It was around that time when, um, Prof was in ICSR, and then we went, uh, we had a lot of, um, visits to ICSR, and we were talking to him. And at that point, we weren't really doubling down on building semiconductors. "Yeah, maybe we'll build chips at some point of time."... We wanted to build boards, we wanted to build modules, we want to build things, uh, you know, devices. In a certain sense, Kama sir twinked us into doing the chip because he said, "Use Shakti." And we said, "Okay, fine." And then we had these prototype, uh, what we called FPGAs, field-programmable gate arrays. They're like-

Unknown Host 55:15 Simulators.

Shashwath T R 55:17 Emulators.

Unknown Host 55:17 Emulators, okay.

Shashwath T R 55:19 Um, and we had Shakti on those. But then we got to a point where we needed more performance, which means you need your own chip. We said, "Sir, when can we get a Shakti chip?" And, uh, Sharan says this very well. Um, he's sitting and writing, and we're sitting and talking to him and, uh, just across the table.

Unknown Host 55:38 Who is it? Ka-

Shashwath T R 55:39 Kama sir.

Unknown Host 55:39 Kama sir, okay.

Shashwath T R 55:41 And, uh, he looks up from where, where he's writing and says, um, in Tamil, I'll translate, "Ni pannu varum." "You do it, it'll come." Then Sharan and I looked at each other, and we were like, "What's he saying?" And, uh, longer conversations over a course of a couple of weeks, he was like, um, "Look, you're not the only people who are having this problem. There is so much demand." He got us talking to other people who have similar problems. Um, until then, I knew that there was a market, but I... it wasn't tangible. So you know how people walk into IIT labs and say, "I want to build X"? And we met a lot of those people in the first few months. Pravar Tak was just starting up. We met a lot more people who were walking into Pravar Tak at that time. One of the best things we did was walk into Pravar Tak as they were just, um... they got their new ro- new office, and we sat in table number one.

Unknown Host 56:37 Mm.

Shashwath T R 56:37 So we met a lot of people who were walking in, walking out. A lot of fun. But, um, the other thing that Prof did for us is that he unlocked a lot of support from IITM, which we could a- access as an incubated company. Um, cheap tool access, um, access to foundry, access to-

Unknown Host 57:00 Wow!

Shashwath T R 57:00 ... funding, VCs, and other things. Um, a lot of conversations we had with VCs turned out-

Unknown Host 57:09 Wait, wait, before you go to VCs-

Shashwath T R 57:10 Yeah

Unknown Host 57:10 ... I just want to recap here. So you, you, you started your company because you had a niche, basically.

Shashwath T R 57:15 Yeah.

Unknown Host 57:15 Right? And, and in your environment, uh, that you grew up in or you existed in, people did start-

Shashwath T R 57:21 Yes

Unknown Host 57:21 ... on their own. So it was not, like, a very risky thing. Is that fair to say?

Shashwath T R 57:25 No, it was risky. I mean, it's always risky when you start something.

Unknown Host 57:28 For sure, but it was not socially risky.

Shashwath T R 57:30 It was not socially risky. It's not like something where, um, uh-

Unknown Host 57:35 Like-

Shashwath T R 57:35 You know, the, the meme of own job while you didn't get-

Unknown Host 57:38 No, no, no

Shashwath T R 57:38 ... own company, you didn't get a job.

Unknown Host 57:39 So, for example, when I quit my job-

Shashwath T R 57:41 Yeah

Unknown Host 57:41 ... and started my first company in 2009, my mom didn't talk to me for three months. [chuckles] It was, it was not like that, right? It wasn't like that at all.

Shashwath T R 57:48 Okay. [chuckles] So, so you were-

Unknown Host 57:50 Yeah, I, I think I also kind of prepared the people around me, so they were like, "Okay, you're finally doing this."

Shashwath T R 57:56 Yeah, okay.

Unknown Host 57:56 And then, um, you were in Pravar Tak, you were in-

Shashwath T R 58:00 Yeah

Unknown Host 58:00 ... the IIT ecosystem, and you were, you were listening to problems of other people-

Shashwath T R 58:03 Yeah

Unknown Host 58:03 ... and trying to figure out what to solve, right?

Shashwath T R 58:05 Yeah.

Unknown Host 58:06 Okay.

Shashwath T R 58:07 And then we settled down on a problem to solve, and we found convergence from everybody else.

Unknown Host 58:16 Um, I'm gonna ask you this question. Uh, you, you spoke very confidently about this entire IIT thing-

Shashwath T R 58:21 Yeah

Unknown Host 58:22 ... helping you, but you are not from IIT.

Shashwath T R 58:23 Yep.

Unknown Host 58:24 You don't have a BTech from IIT. You don't have a PhD from IIT. You don't have an MTech from IIT. So, uh, h- you have a com- company incubator in IIT. Is that allowed?

Shashwath T R 58:32 Apparently. Apparently, what IIT wants is three things: They want their, uh, students to come out and actually make a difference in the world; they want their technology to come out and actually make a difference in the world; and they want collaborators who will funnel more students in to get trained and come out. So we are taking a technology that was developed at IIT and commercializing it. That's Shakti. We potentially hire students, or we work with them at least on an internship basis, and there is a lot of collaboration going on.

Unknown Host 59:13 Mm.

Shashwath T R 59:14 And a lot of my employees are doing their master's at IIT.

Unknown Host 59:19 Right.

Shashwath T R 59:20 So as long as these three things are met-

Unknown Host 59:23 So you're saying that there are a lot of deep linkages anyway?

Shashwath T R 59:25 There are a lot of deep linkages anyway, so-

Unknown Host 59:27 But can I ask you a little bit here, um,

Unknown Host 59:30 from a fundraising point of view, from a startup point of view, in India, there's this feeling that if you're from IIT, doors open, and if you're not-

Shashwath T R 59:37 Yeah

Unknown Host 59:38 ... then it's really painful. Did you feel that?

Shashwath T R 59:40 Um, I didn't feel it, especially early on. It's changing a lot. There are a lot of deep tech founders who are not IITians right now, but then there are lots who are, and I think the IIT brand name has definitely helped us, um, in terms of both fundraising and in terms of access to customers, access to the market, because there is that buzz around the IITs. But I think that's changing, and a lot more- it's a lot more accessible to a lot more people to do a lot more things today.

Unknown Host 1:00:12 Mm-hmm. Okay, so the two threads here are, one is that the world itself is changing. Not everybody really cares whether you went to IIT or not-

Shashwath T R 1:00:22 Yeah

Unknown Host 1:00:22 ... but also IIT itself has changed, and there are a lot of collaborators.

Shashwath T R 1:00:25 A lot of collaborative work going on. I think, um, IIT has changed, uh, especially IIT Madras has changed to look a lot more outwards.

Unknown Host 1:00:35 Mm.

Shashwath T R 1:00:36 You know, uh, there is this, uh, saying among a lot of alum whom I've met, that you don't see time passing inside the campus.

Unknown Host 1:00:44 Mm.

Shashwath T R 1:00:45 And you know how it is, right? Uh, you walk in here, you literally don't see time passing.

Unknown Host 1:00:49 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 1:00:49 It's such an idyllic place.

Unknown Host 1:00:50 Yeah, it's a very idyllic place.

Shashwath T R 1:00:52 But IITM, in the last few years, I think the last 10-ish years, has also started looking outwards to see what we can do in the world.... and, uh, that has made a huge difference in the kind of the quality of engagement and in the way that IIT stuff is going out. I really admire Ather in this sense.

Unknown Host 1:01:15 Mm.

Shashwath T R 1:01:16 Being one of the first companies to come out of this deep tech innovation kind of a thing and actually make a splash in the market.

Unknown Host 1:01:25 Yeah, and a spectacular product.

Shashwath T R 1:01:27 Spectacular product. One of the first, uh, mobility products to come out in a really long time. Um, it's been great watching that.

Unknown Host 1:01:38 Yeah. Yeah, and we-

Shashwath T R 1:01:41 And-

Unknown Host 1:01:41 - we, we, we got a ringside access.

Shashwath T R 1:01:43 Yeah.

Unknown Host 1:01:44 Got to hear how they're building that company.

Shashwath T R 1:01:47 Yeah, and, uh, Sharan talks about watching Tarun... He didn't know it was Tarun in Ather at that time, driving a prototype scooter round and round campus [chuckles] in the early days, um, before they launched. To me, I think there's a feedback loop going on between the industry and the academia. Um, Research Park is a beautiful ecosystem for that. Bringing in ideas, and that is reinforcing, uh, IITM's engagement outside, and that is bringing in more people who want to contribute and collaborate. I think that for outward-looking thing is something which is beautiful, and I think... I really hope that that continues for years and years.

Unknown Host 1:02:26 Yeah. That's fair. I mean, thank you so much. I mean, we've, we've spoken about a lot of things, and I had some things that I'd written down. I think I've covered everything.

Shashwath T R 1:02:35 Mm.

Unknown Host 1:02:35 Um, I don't want to keep you for much long. I spent a lot of time already. I'll end with one very, very, very cringe LinkedIn-type [chuckles] question.

Shashwath T R 1:02:43 Yeah.

Unknown Host 1:02:43 I'm already sorry for it. Um, [chuckles] like typical LinkedIn question: What has fatherhood taught you about starting up and vice versa? [laughing]

Shashwath T R 1:02:56 Oh, wow! They go hand in hand for me.

Unknown Host 1:02:59 In fact,

Unknown Host 1:03:00 I was just thinking when you were saying, if your startup started during COVID-

Shashwath T R 1:03:04 Yeah.

Unknown Host 1:03:04 - technically, it's a COVID baby.

Shashwath T R 1:03:06 It is a COVID baby. [laughing]

Unknown Host 1:03:07 [chuckles]

Shashwath T R 1:03:08 And my son is just pre-COVID, right?

Unknown Host 1:03:12 Mm.

Shashwath T R 1:03:13 Uh, he was less than one year old. He was just about one year old when he actually formally started. And, uh, you know, Sharan says you have to be crazy to do this. I don't think you have to be crazy to do it. I think you have to be passionate enough to do it, that peop- other people think that you're crazy. Mm. And, uh, you know, you have one co-founder who's, uh, raising a kid, now two kids.

Unknown Host 1:03:36 Mm.

Shashwath T R 1:03:36 I have the second one. And you have another co-founder who's doing a PhD under Professor Kamakoti in the CS department, which is one of the hardest PhDs in India, I think. [chuckles] But, uh, fa- fatherhood, for me, is... One of the things that really drove me to building the company was, "This is my last chance. If I get caught in the whole fatherhood thing, and, uh, parenting, and, you know, people are not gonna allow you to start up, so do it now." [chuckles] And another part of it was, I really wanted- want my kids to see me the way I saw my dad, as an independent person in his own right, um, building something and, uh, engaging with the world on his own terms. So that is the-- that is one of the reasons that I started up.

Unknown Host 1:04:32 That is beautiful.

Shashwath T R 1:04:34 Mm. Another thing is, uh, you know, a young company is like a young kid, and I'm learning a lot about fatherhood from running a company, and about running a company from, uh, dealing with my kid. Patience. [laughing]

Unknown Host 1:04:53 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 1:04:53 Lots of patience. Take a deep breath. You won't believe how much reading parenting books and parenting blogs is teaching me about being a better manager. It's fun. [chuckles]

Unknown Host 1:05:11 Nice. Um, on that note, let's stop. I want to just appreciate you before we, uh, close. Uh, there are times when... This is for the audience. There are times when we've been on call, and, uh, I can, I can see that he's, uh, holding his baby, uh, and still on the call or feeding his baby and still on the call. So it's, it's kinda nice to see, um, uh, like a very involved father, uh, very hands-on father.

Shashwath T R 1:05:36 Can I say something there?

Unknown Host 1:05:37 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 1:05:37 Um, you know, there is this picture of, uh, John F. Kennedy sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office?

Unknown Host 1:05:43 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 1:05:43 And, uh, his kids are peeking out from under the desk.

Unknown Host 1:05:48 Yeah.

Shashwath T R 1:05:49 I subscribe to that image of fatherhood. I don't subscribe to the idea that your, uh, work and life... Work-life balance is something where you separate work and life so hard, that you don't have time for the kids or you don't have, uh, if you have kids, you shouldn't be doing this kind of work. Uh, I bring my kids to office all the time.

Unknown Host 1:06:10 Nice. Uh, I, [chuckles] I wanted to share something really funny. I, I interviewed Srinath on this table-

Shashwath T R 1:06:15 Yeah.

Unknown Host 1:06:16 ... and, uh, Srinath is also a father, very involved father, and he was talking about how he took his kid, kid, kids, I can't remember, uh, to the launch.

Shashwath T R 1:06:23 Yeah.

Unknown Host 1:06:24 Uh, and the rocket launch, whatever, whatever. [chuckles] And I'm thinking in my mind: "This child must be thinking everybody's father is a rocket scientist." [laughing]

Shashwath T R 1:06:32 [chuckles]

Unknown Host 1:06:34 Um-

Shashwath T R 1:06:35 You really wonder about that, don't you?

Unknown Host 1:06:36 Yeah. Okay, thank you so much. Um, that was the podcast for today. Please like, share, subscribe, comment. Um, you can follow Mindgrove on their social media or on their website. And if you're an electronics engineer, please look out for their products on these e-commerce sites. Thank you.