Indu Navar is in her austere office, late-morning sunlight illuminating her face as she explains what her company, Mountain View, California-based Serus, does.
But as passionate as she obviously is, her explanation would glaze over the eyes of most people. And maybe it's because she always seems two or three steps ahead of those around her. "I'm a very analytical person," Ms. Navar says. "I like intelligence, analytics, and using all of my skills that I have learned in dabbling in computer science."
There's little doubt that Ms. Navar, 36, used many of them to move up the Silicon Valley ladder—starting out as just another foreign student clutching a masters in computer science. In time, she would rise to team leader at different software companies. Now, she is chief executive officer and co-founder of late-stage startup Serus.
Principal among those skills is a drive nurtured in her native Bangalore, where her dad, an electrical engineer, and mom, a businesswoman, own an aluminum casting factory. Ms. Navar frequently visited the plant as a child, marveling at manufacturing's intricate processes.
Like her two brothers, she earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in India. Deciding that the traditional arranged marriage was not for her, Ms. Navar set out on a daunting, first-time trip to the United States, for postgraduate work at California State University at Chico.
After stints at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, Cisco, Silicon Graphics, and Healtheon, Ms. Navar and co-founder Barbara Hoefle launched Serus.
The name derives from cirrus clouds, those feathery wisps that tornadoes leave in their wake. Serus is actually in the business of upheaval prevention, offering software that musters "the right information at the right place at the right time," to borrow from the company jingle.
Ms. Navar argues that companies have only half the information they need to make goods and get them to customers. Serus, she says, offers software to identify and collect the missing information scattered among a company's suppliers, partners, and customers—so that everything can be pulled together and made sense of.
And when the inevitable wrinkles threaten to undermine supplier-manufacturer-customer links, Serus modules are there sifting through the data, ready to suggest workarounds—which might, for example, call for substitute parts to overcome delays in the normal parts supply line.
Serus, which is shooting for $100 million in sales by 2010, is focused on streamlining two globally dispersed manufacturing industries at the moment: semiconductors (AMD is a customer) and contract manufacturing (Solectron is another).
But growing will require more cash, and the company hopes to soon close its third round of venture funding.
Ms. Navar does have another side. A divorcee, she is raising her 7-year-old son Aiden, works out, and plays a decent game of tennis. Once fearful of heights, she decided to face her fears by taking pilot lessons and, along with several employees, skydiving. Next up: scuba diving.
As with traveling to strange lands or risking all on a startup, Ms. Navar says fears must be confronted. People, she says, must not be constrained by boundaries that are not really there.
—Herbert A. Sample