Networking on the 'Bangalore Express'

Networking on the 'Bangalore Express'
DEMAND SOARS FOR FLIGHTS BETWEEN U.S., INDIAN TECH HUBS
San Jose Mercury News

Harish Abbott will do just about anything to get a spot on Lufthansa's popular San Francisco-to-Bangalore flight -- even endure an economy middle seat.

The German airline is renowned for having the most direct flight to the Indian tech hub, whose short-runway airport has not kept up with Bangalore's boom. The flight, dubbed ``The Bangalore Express,'' has another advantage: networking in the clouds.

``I make sure I have all my business cards ready for that flight,'' said Abbott, president and co-founder of Ugenie, a start-up shopping engine with offices in Sunnyvale and Bangalore.

In the 1990s, the ``Nerd Birds'' -- flights from San Jose to Boston or Austin -- were the common trips of Silicon Valley's engineers and executives. Then business plans went global. Now, flying across double-digit time zones is just another job requirement for many in the valley -- venture capitalists sniffing for start-up riches in India and China, supply-chain executives keeping tabs on Asian counterparts and valley-based start-up executives like Abbott, who visits his Bangalore team every three or four weeks.

International travel is, well, soaring, reflecting the growth of global business. In 2005, 63 million international air travelers took off from the United States, a 24 percent increase from 1995, according to the International Trade Administration.

``We used to concern ourselves about commutes from Tracy to San Jose. Now, it's San Francisco to Taipei, or San Francisco to Bangalore,'' said Marc Casto, president of Santa Clara-based Casto Travel, which books more than $50 million a year in international tickets for corporate clients.

Now that valley companies work on the world clock, executives, as well as rank-and-file engineers, find themselves frequent international fliers.

``When I started in high tech in 1988, heck, international calls were uncommon,'' recalled Doug Kahn, a vice president at Palm, the Sunnyvale maker of handheld devices. He now makes about two trips to Asia every quarter. It's not unusual for him to cross the globe for a meeting -- and then immediately hop on a plane home.

The 9,000-mile journey to Bangalore is one of the most grueling treks for Silicon Valley's global commuters. There are no direct flights from the United States to India's capital of tech, whose gleaming new office buildings are packed with thousands of engineers. In some cases, the journey requires two stops and layovers of eight hours or more.

In comparison, the Bangalore Express -- Flight 455, San Francisco to Frankfurt, and Flight 754, Frankfurt to Bangalore -- is a mere 21-and-a-half-hour jaunt, including a two-hour-or-less layover. For business travelers making the trip on a regular basis, avoiding a camp-out in Singapore's mall-like Changi Airport is worth the pricier Lufthansa ticket. A business-class ticket on the Bangalore Express can be about $2,000 more than a similar seat on Singapore Airlines's San Francisco-Bangalore flight; Lufthansa's coach seats can cost several hundred dollars more.

Other airlines

The Lufthansa flight won the title Bangalore Express because it was the first to cash in on the Silicon Valley-Bangalore tech connection with the most direct route. And it remains the most popular among many in the tech industry. There are, though, new ways to get from the valley to Bangalore. Lufthansa partner United Airlines operates a San Francisco-Frankfurt flight at a similar time, connecting to Lufthansa's Frankfurt-to-Bangalore flight. And British Airways recently began offering daily service out of San Francisco to Bangalore with a three-hour layover in London.

The Bangalore Express has an 80-seat business-class section, as well as 16 first-class seats. ``It's got the heavy hitters on board,'' observed Steve Hendrickson, a consultant with Sabre Airline Solutions, a consulting firm.

``I've seen people being interviewed for jobs on the plane,'' said Ramesh Dimba, a manager at Sunnyvale data management company Network Appliance. He figures 80 percent of the passengers on board the Bangalore Express are tech professionals, and spends a lot of his flight time making new contacts and trading industry gossip. Dimba also likes to do a little, uh, data mining. He covers his company badge in hopes of catching competitors off guard.

``I've talked about a ton of deals on that plane,'' said international air warrior Mark Sherman, general partner with Menlo Park venture capital firm Battery Ventures. He's had numerous mid-flight pitches made to him. ``Usually, the guy sitting next to me is a tech entrepreneur.''

Ravi Kumar Shelvankar, senior sales manager for tech outsourcing giant Infosys Technologies, often picks up a dozen business cards on his regular cross-global commute between his Fremont office and Bangalore headquarters. He's chatted up venture capitalists, observed ``pre-deal'' deals and even won over a new client.

Full flights

``You get much better bandwidth -- attention -- from people,'' Shelvankar said, before easing into his posh 9-C business class seat last week on a fully booked Bangalore Express departing San Francisco. ``You keep your antennas and eyes open.''

The younger engineers, and start-up founders, tend to be found in the back of the plane, while the executives sit up front, observed Billie Rivera, an engineer with San Jose's Mentor Graphics, whose technology tests semiconductor designs. Once a month, she flies Lufthansa to Frankfurt before transferring to another flight to Cairo. She once used the in-flight connections to find a tech-savvy patent attorney. ``How often do you sit next to somebody who understands the semiconductor industry from the ground up?''

Lufthansa, which has been flying to the South Asian country since 1959, began offering three San Francisco-Bangalore flights a week in 2001. ``The flights were full right from the beginning,'' observed Don Bunkenburg, Lufthansa's head of corporate sales.

Corporate clients pleaded for more. In 2003, the airline increased the flights to five a week, and a year-and-a-half later, Lufthansa started offering daily flights from San Francisco to Bangalore. The airline uses Boeing 747s for both legs of the journey. Most of the flights are more than 90 percent full. The German carrier offers Bollywood movies on all its flights, and provides Indian cuisine and flight attendants who speak Indian dialects on its Frankfurt to India routes.

Still, the airline ``very often'' receives pleas from executives desperate to get on a flight to Bangalore, said Uwe Schulz, Lufthansa's station manager at San Francisco International Airport. ``Sometimes it's possible, sometimes it's not if the flight is completely full and we do not have a seat. We cannot sell it twice.''

The Bangalore Express can have other downsides, as well.

``You have to start dressing nicer,'' quipped Ash Lilani, head of Silicon Valley Bank Global and a regular Lufthansa passenger. ``You never know who you are going to sit next to.''