At the age of 17, with just two months worth of money in his pocket, Vivek Ranadivé left his home in Bombay for the United States. He dreamed of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after watching a documentary in India years earlier. He was able to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree from MIT in Electrical Engineering, and later an MBA from Harvard.
Once out of school, Ranadivé decided to start his own information technology company. Disappointed in the inefficiencies in software development as compared to hardware, he developed technology that would deliver electronic information to users in real time through a centralized bus. He became “Mr. Real Time” when he first built “The Information Bus,” or TIB, a software version of the staple computer bus concept for hardware.
With a prototype TIB under construction, Ranadivé put his business degree from Harvard to use and sought start-up capital in northern California. He received seed capital from Teknekron Corp in 1985 and Teknekron Software Systems Inc. (TSS) was born. Ranadivé turned to faculty at MIT and hired talented staff from nearby Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.
TSS found initial success creating software infrastructure that integrated and delivered market data to trading rooms at Goldman Sachs and then many large banks and other financial organizations. Teknekron created the “trading floor of the future,” eventually digitizing all of Wall Street.
For more on Vivek Ranadivé and how vision became a reality, watch this short YouTube biography.
