Paying homage to the late Rajeev Motwani

It was a sombre afternoon yesterday as we silently walked into the Motwani residence in Atherton. There were many faces, all silent, grieving the untimely death of professor Rajeev Motwani.

Shailesh Mehta, Kanwal Rekhi, Vivek Ranadive, Ron Conway, Vish Misra, M.R.Rangaswami, Naren Gupta, Vinita Gupta, Manish Chandra, Vas Bhandarkar, Prashant Shah, Prabhakar Raghavan, and hundreds more kept coming by. All shaken up with the realization of how fleeting this life can be. Now here, gone the next minute. Ron Conway was whispering that he had just arranged a meeting of Rajeev with Mark Andreessan as they have never met.

As we stared at his picture and listening to the chanting of Taittriya Upanishad and Shiva Manas Puja, the air was filled with melancholy of a departed soul. A brilliant scientist suddenly gone at the prime of his career. We silently hugged Asha (Rajeev’s wife) trying to fathom her grief.

As our scriptures say, each one’s life is pre-ordained for a set number of years. Each one of us has a deadline, highly unpredictable, but sure to come. So let us live this life with love, compassion, and care.

Good Bye, dear Rajeev Motwani

I am just shocked to hear of the sad and untimely demise of Rajeev Motwani, well-known angel investor and professor of Computer Science at Stanford.  He was an adviser to the Google founders from the start and invested in several start-ups. After graduating from IIT, Kanpur in 1983, Rajeev joined EECS at UC Berkeley and got his Ph.D. Then he joined the faculty at Stanford and has been teaching/researching for last 20 years. His special interest was in data mining, computational theory, and algorithms.

Back in 2003, at the suggestion of a few friends, Rajeev and I started a technology think-tank group to share new ideas. It did not last very long due to our hectic schedules. But the first meeting was held in San Jose, where Rajeev spoke of his work in “data streams” and Eric Brewer of Berkely talked about his CAP theorem and BASE theory. We had several very smart folks who enjoyed listening to Rajeev’s passion for new technology. I was fortunate to have been invited to a few of Rajeev’s investment companies as an informal adviser. I always enjoyed talking to him and was impressed with his inquisitiveness to ask many real-world questions about new technology.

He will be missed in the silicon valley technology circles. I pray for his wife Asha to have the courage to sustain this terrible loss.

I feel extremely humbled at this moment on the ephemeral nature of life.

Rest in peace my friend.

Web 3.0

At the “D conference” (All things Digital) hosted by the Walls Street Journal last week, there was sudden use of the term Web 3.0. The hosts said, “So what’s the seminal development that’s ushering in the era of Web 3.0? It’s the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services”.

I like the tone of this description. It’s everything opposite to what we have been doing for years in the computing business. It’s not fat client, not complex, bug-prone, attack-prone software like Windows (origin from QDOS, Quick and Dirty Operating System), not power-hungry and lowly battery-life, not redundancy in data, not closed proprietary systems, and not labor-intensive maintenance.  Just look at Apple iPhone. It has the attributes of a Web 3.0. – elegant touch screen user interface, myriads of applications developed by others, just feels simple and hassle free.

I like this quote from The Wall Street Journal of today,

“…the complete integration of computing into every part of our lives in a way that is seamless, ubiquitous and ideally, dead simple. From using easy gestures to grab any piece of information from the Web to having powerful computers in the palm of your hand to being able to quickly dip into complex social networks to getting real-time information from across the globe as it happens, this is an era when  computing could become as integrated and invisible as electricity and just as important.”

This reminds me of the late Mark Weiser (of Xerox PARC) who predicted back in 1991 (18 years ago!) – The most fundamental technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Some of us never thought we will see that prediction in our life times. But we are there now.

A long march over 50 years – from “big computers”, to “small computers”, to “connected computers”, to finally “invisible computers embedded in every day objects”.

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