Three pairs of friends who entered the risky business of entrepreneurship and made it were Awais Nemat and Guy Hutchison of D5 Networks (acquired by Marvell Technology Group, in 2006); Rajan Raghavan and Prabhakar Sundarrajan of Ankeena Networks (acquired by Juniper Networks, in 2010); and Osman Rashid and Babur Habib of Kno, Inc. [working in the field of education with the conviction that the future of textbook is digital].

Murrali Rangarajan, a TiE charter member, provided the introduction of the program. Rangarajan said TiE had been teaching entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship to its members for the last eighteen years. Speaking of the South Asians in the US, he said "we have decided to settle here. We might as well be a strong community."

Next in line was OPEN President, Naeem Zafar. Besides being a successful entrepreneur Zafar is currently a faculty member at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, where he teaches entrepreneurship. Zafar said OPEN's sixty-percent programs were geared towards helping entrepreneurs and the rest were to help professionals.