Two faculty members from the MIT Sloan School of Management have been ringing the bells on Wall Street.
Sohu.com, co-founded by its CEO, MIT alumnus Charles Zhang (Ph.D. 1994), and by Sloan Professor Edward Roberts, founder/chair of MIT's Entrepreneurship Center, celebrated its 10th anniversary as a company by ringing the opening bell for NASDAQ trading on Monday, March 13, in New York. Sohu has been named the official and exclusive Internet content and systems sponsor for the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
Founded in Boston, the company is headquartered in Beijing, with all of its 1,600 employees and activities based in China. The company is one of China's leading Internet portals, with revenues exceeding $100 million in 2005. Roberts and Zhang are the only company directors who have served since Sohu's founding.
This past December, Professor Michael Cusumano, Sloan faculty member in Strategy and Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship, also got to participate in an opening bell-ringing ceremony. He was there when Patni Computer Systems, founded by MIT Sloan graduate Narendra Patni (G.M. '69), went public on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, Dec. 8. Cusumano has been a director of the company for the past two years.
Patni is currently the sixth-largest Indian software company, with more than 11,000 employees (including more than 2,000 in the United States) and 2005 revenues of approximately $450 million. It specializes in building customized software systems as well as providing maintenance and engineering services.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 22, 2006 (download PDF).
