How Mr. GPS Changed the World

HE IS NOT A BUSINESSMAN. HE IS NOT A DREAMER.

He is a visionary. And he knows the difference between the two. “A vision has a foundation of certain intuitive fundamentals to be successful… it has an understanding of if you have the right time. Can I make a right team to make the dream successful? Is the market opportunity right? Do I have enough funding? So there are a number of things which come into play for a company to be successful and most importantly there is luck,” quips extraordinary technologist Kanwar Chadha, better known as Mr GPS.

Chadha founded SiRF Technology in 1995 in San Jose, California, with nothing more than a simple but daring vision: GPS for consumers. Today, he has over 20 patents in GPS-enabled applications, and has recently worked on a high bandwidth wireless technology that has been acquired by Facebook.

Born and raised along the borders of northern India, Chadha grew up to be a humble trailblazer striving to shape the world of technology and innovation. He graduated from India’s premier engineering institute, IIT-Delhi, and went to the United States to further his education and witness the American dream.

“I did my MBA and MS together from University of Pennsylvania and got my first job at Intel. My plan was to have some experience in the US and then go back to India. But that five-year-plan has remained such ever since.”

After moving to the Silicon Valley — the hub for technologists, where innovation and entrepreneurship is a part of everyone’s DNA — Chadha began to push the boundaries. “Intel gave me lots of freedom to do things the way I wanted to do.” But, after a certain period of time, he started feeling the constraints of working in a big company. “I had ideas about some new processors which I was developing, but Intel wasn’t committed to that project. That was the first motivation for me to go and do things the way I wanted to.”