All Roads Lead to Reggie

Reggie Aggarwal, a k a Rajiv, grew up in Alexandria. Two siblings, two government engineer parents, an upper-middle-class family. He was a corporate tax attorney with Shaw Pittman until last fall, when he decided to create cvent.com, an e-marketing and communications business. Now he works 9 a.m. to midnight daily at least six days a week, having taken the start-up from no employees in September to 80 today--all before a formal launch.

Aggarwal talks faster than a motorized racetrack rabbit runs, and you learn to interrupt him because his sentences have no natural stopping point. When he tells you he never drinks coffee, you feel relieved. Imagine if he did.

"All roads lead to Reggie," quips Dolly Oberoi, CEO of C² Technologies, a management consulting firm in Falls Church and one of the few female council members. Last year, Washington Business Forward branded Aggarwal a "networker extraordinaire."

At council events, he works the crowd like a candidate on the rope line--warm, immediately personal, first names and back slaps for everyone. He's had practice: Student VP at University of Virginia, student president of Washington and Lee law school, student president of Georgetown graduate law school, president of the Indian American Bar Association, associate at Shaw Pittman. Oh, and student president of his high school.

"I was the best high school president ever in history!" he says.

Clearly this is not a guy who needs a lot of encouragement. Which is why, when Aggarwal met the man who would become his best friend and mentor at a tennis tournament three years ago, it was a very short walk from idea (Hey, let's start a group for Indian professionals) to fruition.

Bansal, 34, provided advice and levelheadedness for Aggarwal, offering his practical business experience and a certain name cachet as MicroStrategy COO that Aggarwal could use when calling others. Aggarwal's tools were raw energy and persistence.

In the early days, he culled his invitation list from the local papers. He made friends with secretaries and was as insistent as a car salesman on a slow month. When he wanted to nab Mody, he called him "15 times." (Okay. "At least 10," he amends later.)

With each prospective member he called, he made a point of naming all the other bigwigs who had already agreed to come. When the group expanded to non-Indians, Aggarwal had more explaining to do.

"Most of them were like, 'I'm not Indian. Why are you calling me?' " And some said, " 'How did you get my number?' "

The draw for many non-Indians was access to Indians, one of the most successful immigrant groups in the high-tech arena. In large part because of the high-level engineering and computer degrees that immigrants from India carry to the United States, they have achieved remarkable professional success in this country. Their average household income, according to 1990 census data, was about $60,000--more than Japanese- or Chinese Americans and considerably above the national average of about $39,000.

In Silicon Valley from 1995 to '98, 9 percent of high-tech start-ups were being run by Indians, according to Annalee Saxenian, a professor of regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

The council "came out of nowhere and it's eclipsed a lot of the other organizations," says Mario Marino, the software pioneer and guru of D.C.-area entrepreneurship. "They did a very good job aggregating the Indian population--that is a very sought-after base."

Even as the council grew to encompass a majority of non-Indians, Aggarwal and Bansal decided not to change the name of their group. It attracted people.

"What I've done to build the council," says the ever-pithy Aggarwal, "is market other people."

In recounting the history of the council, Aggarwal cautions a reporter against confusing the man with the message. He and the council are separate creatures, he insists. But it's awfully hard not to link the two.

It's Aggarwal who worked--as he frequently says--"1,000 hours" on the council during the first year. It is he who bought two cell phones, each with 1,600 minutes of air time a month, to keep up with council business. It is he who worked for three years with no pay, and he who boasts of the organization like a first-time father clutching his newborn's fingers.

"There's going to be more money in that room than at any time ever!" he says in advance of a recent event with venture capital firms. Then, as if that didn't make the point, he says, "Let's put it this way. If a bomb went off in that room, you'd kill half the economy of Washington." Jeez.