TiEcon 2021 Features Who’s Who of Executives at Virtual Annual Event, ‘Elevate. Engage. Emerge’

Fisker Inc. co-founder and chief financial officer Dr. Geeta Gupta-Fisker was one of the grand keynote speakers at TiEcon 2021. The Indian American executive (seen above with her husband and business partner Henrik Fisker at an art show in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Feb. 22, 2012), chatted with Structure Capital managing partner Jillian Manus on Day 1 of the conference. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

India-West Staff Reporter

A plethora of chief executive officers and company executives, many of them Indian Americans, from some of the country’s most innovative companies gathered virtually to speak and lend their entrepreneurial advice as part of The Indus Entrepreneurs’ annual TiEcon event.

The TiEcon 2021 event – its second consecutive virtual event brought on by the COVID-19 global pandemic – aimed to “Elevate. Engage. Emerge” its event goers, some 7,800 people in total.

Typically a two-day conference, the event, which featured more than 200 speakers, spanned three days from May 6 through May 8.

According to TiE Silicon Valley – the chapter that hosted the event – this year’s TiEcon had in excess of 31,000 registrants from over 100 countries, making it the biggest TiEcon to date, spanning nearly three decades.

The highlight of each day were the grand keynote speeches, which bookended the tracks of genre-specific tech topics.

On Day 1, Tata Trust chair Ratan Tata, Inventus Capital Partners managing director Kanwal Rekhi, and CNBC TV 18 managing editor Shereen Bhan spoke on ‘Entrepreneurship in India’ as part of the initial grand keynote; and Mayfield Fund managing partner Navin Chaddha chatted with Forbes senior editor Alex Konrad for the second morning grand keynote.

In the afternoon, there were a pair of closing grand keynotes. Up first was Fisker Inc. co-founder and chief financial officer Dr. Geeta Gupta-Fisker, who chatted with Structure Capital managing partner Jillian Manus; the final speaker of the day was Nasdaq president and CEO Adena Friedman, who spoke with TIME executive chair Don Callahan.

Day 2 opened with two grand keynotes – Innovating in Healthcare Through the Pandemic and Beyond; and Scaling and Transforming Companies.

The Healthcare keynote featured Gilead Sciences Inc. chair and CEO Daniel O’Day and Forbes Magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard. The Scaling keynote was highlighted by Palo Alto Networks CEO and chair Nikesh Arora, PAN senior director of product management Neelima Rustagi, and PAN VP of products Ankur Shah.

The closing grand keynote, titled ‘Realizing Grand Vision at Hyper Velocity’, featured UiPath co-founder and CEO Daniel Dines and Alkeon Capital managing partner Abhi Arun.

The final day of the event was opened by the grand keynote, ‘Entertaining the World – Netflix and its Culture of Reinvention’. The keynote featured Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings, Netflix vice president of content engineering Gagan Hasteer, and Netflix India vice president of content Monika Shergill.

The final keynote of the three-day event put Coinbase chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee and Coinbase Global Inc. chief legal officer Paul Grewal on center stage.

The purpose of TiEcon is to foster tech entrepreneurship globally. According to the event website, the mission eyes budding and successful entrepreneurs, enterprise executives, government delegations, technologists and working professionals. Through multiple tracks and programs, the conference focused on today’s trending technologies and domains, while providing a great networking platform.

TiEcon focused on the trends by opening up tracks throughout the course of the days’ events. Among the tracks were Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning; Cloud and Security; Entrepreneurship; Future of Work; Global Connect; Healthcare Reimagined; TiE Youth; Diversity and Inclusion; CXO Forum; and Social Impact.

The event also featured a number of programs for those in attendance to view. Among the programs in this year’s event included a Startup Bootcamp; AI Skills Lab; Mentor Connect; VC Connect; Author’s Corner; and an Expo.

To view the TiEcon event, readers can head over to its YouTube channel, where many videos from the conference were uploaded.