CREATING A VIRTUOUS CIRCLE FOR EXPONENTIAL CHANGE
VISION
Rajeev Circle Fellowship is designed to create, mentor and empower young entrepreneurs from the developing world and link them closely to the Silicon Valley in California. The fellowship has supported over 100 fellows over the last five years.
RCF is an evolving network of entrepreneurs bound by a synergistic set of activities, vision, philosophy and aspirations. The fellows also serve as a distributed network of “scouts” in their regions of activity. Often scouts introduce and mentor other entrepreneurs like themselves. We hope that the fellowship will create powerful network effects in their regions of actvity.
ABOUT RAJEEV MOTWANI
Rajeev Motwani was a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.Rajeev was a luminary in many academic disciplines. He made fundamental contributions to the foundations of computer science, search and information retrieval, streaming databases and data mining, and robotics. In these areas, he considered questions as philosophical as what makes problems inherently intractable, and as practical as finding similar images and documents from a database. His text book, Randomized Algorithms, with Prabhakar Raghavan, epitomizes this meeting of the abstract and the concrete, and has been a source of inspiration to countless students. He has received many awards for his research; notably, the Gödel Prize, and the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. Rajeev’s academic legacy extends to teaching and advising a large number of students, many of whom have gone on to successful academic careers.
In addition to his academic accomplishments, Rajeev was a legendary figure in Silicon Valley. He was an early investor and technical advisor for many ventures, and mentored dozens of young enterpreneurs. In the words of one of those young enterpreneurs, Sergey Brin, “Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.”
WHAT IS THE RAJEEV CIRCLE FELLOWSHIP?
Rajeev Circle Fellowship is a growing community of tech savvy change makers who share a vision of peace, prosperity, human rights and freedom in South Asia.
Designed as a social movement from the ground up by its founder Asha Jadeja, RCF is a family driven charitable organisation not tethered in any university or institution. The fellowship aims to create a grass roots network of budding venture capitalists in South Asia who will extend Asha and her late husband Proffesor Rajeev Motwani’s vision of bringing a ‘mindset of abundance, risk taking and disruption’ into their home regions.
The fellowship is a one of a kind phenomenon that operates by itself with the help of a group of senior volunteers in the Bay Area that form the Rajeev Circle. Once inducted as a Rajeev Circle Fellow, its members become a tight knit community of exponential thinkers and doers that transcend the usual definitions and do what it takes to extend this network to other like minded entrepreneurs.
Each year the fellows get to immerse themselves in the heart of the Silicon Valley – meeting influential entrepreneurs and mentors, attending conferences and bootcamps, and even pitching to potential investors.
Asha’s vision has evolved towards grooming our Fellows to form a distributed network of budding Scout VCs. Our scouts will enable hundreds of brilliant young entrepreneurs and problem solvers from South Asia to get a running start in their own projects through the wealth of experience and resources available in the Valley. For more mature projects we see our fellowship as providing escape velocity to our entrepreneurs and their startups.
After their first visits, RC Fellows acquire a “permanent home” in the Valley, giving them unprecedented freedom to visit for sales, conferences, business development and fund raising opportunities. Our fellows have grown into a dynamic, living and breathing corridor between South Asia, Europe and US. All expenses (roughly $70,000 per fellow) are borne entirely by the Motwani Jadeja Foundation.