TiE Boston held its annual gala on December 1, 2016 at the Burlington Mariott. It was a sold out event with more than 200 Charter Members, guests and awardees attending the event. Laura Teicher, Executive Director, welcomed the guests. Praveen Tailam, TiE Boston President, presented the Year in Review. “TiE is a thriving organization with 60 Chapters around the world. This past year, TiE ScaleUp featured 28 companies, 51 mentors and more than 150 hours of classes. It received the TiE’s Most Innovative Program Award for 2016. TyE, which is now in its 13th year and offers $10K in prizes, is now a part of 30 Chapters globally. TiE StartUp Con is New England’s largest startup conference and was attended by more than 900 people. TiE Angels has now invested a total of $6M in 20 companies, has 40+ members, and screens 100+ companies per year. One of the goals for the coming year is to focus on young women entrepreneurs.”

The recipients for the various awards this year were:

Clarence Friedman: Health Innovator of the Year

Kalpesh Sheth: High Tech Player of the Year

Liz Powers: Changemaker of the Year

Pallavi Singh: Outstanding Service to TiE

Moha Shah: Volunteer of the Year

Ameeta Soni, VIvek Soni: Charter Members of the Year

Nars Krishnamachari: Rising Entrepreneur

The Entrepreneur Achievement Awards were presented to Mir Arif, Anil Gupta, Ravi Ika, Bhaskar Panigrahi, Ramesh Rasker, Mustapha Shaikh and Praveen Tipirneni.

As expected, the highlight of the evening of the conferring of the Lifetime Achievement Award on Mukesh Chatter. Mukesh is a highly successful high tech entrepreneur and currently co-manages an investment firm NeoNet Capital LLC, focusing on a wide range of public and private investments. He co-founded Nexabit Netwrks, a terabit switch/router company, which was acquired by Lucent Technologies for over $900M. He hold 19 patents. He and his wife Preeti manage a foundation that supports among other activities, education and health care. He holds a MS in Computer and Systems Engineering from RPI.

Mukesh believes in One is None and Two is One. He talked about building the right team and right culture, the incredible rewards of success, from going from being Nobody to Somebody, how irrational exuberance clouds the mind, the timing in the success or failure of the company, the feeling of dark and cold when his second company failed, and the experiences of both end of the spectrum from highest exuberance to the lowest of depths. Since then, he has been actively involved in the Entrepreneurship for Common Good by focusing on billion people problems such as electricity, clean water, transportation, etc. Even though we tend to take a lot of credit for our successes, in reality we have no control of the outcomes.

A special thanks to all the sponsors, Brown Brothers Harriman, Madison Park Group, IBM, Foley Hoag, MIT, Northern Trust, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Tanna Insurance and many others who made all this possible. The dinner was catered by Masala Art.