For  an Entrepreneur, Opportunities Unbounded 

New York Times 
August 16, 1998, Sunday  
Section: The City Weekly Desk 

When Kamal Singh thinks back to his boarding school  days in the Punjab, in India, he remembers one thing 
above all else. In each classroom,  Mr. Singh said, the teacher lectured from a podium. And nailed to each 
podium  was a wooden plaque inscribed with a saying from a former Prime Minister, Jawaharlal  Nehru: 
''Success often comes to those who dare and act. It seldom goes to the  timid.'' 

''I get goose bumps just thinking about it,'' said Mr. Singh, 33, leaning  over a conference table at Maestro 
Technologies, the consulting  company he owns  on Broad Street in the financial district. ''It has really 
stayed with me.'' 

For  Mr. Singh, who dresses in crisp Oxford shirts and exudes energy, starting his  own business was the 
apotheosis of his military-style upbringing as a Sikh. Not  only did he memorize the sayings of Nehru, he said, 
but also ran obstacle courses  on weekends and learned the meaning of ''duty, discipline and education.'' 

''We were taught what you need to run a business from sixth or seventh grade,'' he  said. He came to the United 
States in 1987 and received his master's degree from  SUNY- Buffalo before settling in New York City.

 ''It was a very exciting concept  for me to come here and be something,'' he said of opportunities in America.
 ''The  freedom people have here, it amazes me.'' 

In striking out on his own, Mr. Singh  has also realized the goal of entrepreneurship that many immigrant 
consultants  dream of. He said the move came after he got ''fed up'' with his former employer,  Sharp Decisions, 
on Park Avenue. From 1993 until last year, he said, he was assigned  to Computer Sciences Corporation, the same 
company as Mr. Rivera. For the first  two years, he said, Sharp kept an average of 30 percent of the $90 an hour it  
billed Computer Sciences for his services, a cut that Mr. Singh said was much  too high.

 ''I was being exploited,'' he said. ''Then late last year, I decided  enough is enough.'' 

The founder of Sharp Decisions, Michael Baer, said the 30  percent cut was fair. ''Kamal is quite an entrepreneur in 
spirit,'' Mr. Baer said.  ''We knew he would not be happy until he was his own boss. He is not the typical  personality.'' 

In 1993, Mr. Singh started as a side business Maestro Technologies,  one of New York's first Internet service 
providers. He remembers squeezing computer  units, monitors and cables into a room the size of a walk-in closet on 
the top  floor of a ramshackle building at 29 John Street. When problems cropped up, he  would drive in at night from 
his apartment in Rego Park, Queens, step past homeless  people sleeping in the doorway and ride the rickety elevator 
to the office. 

When  he quit Sharp Decisions last December, he said, it seemed natural to contract  his consulting services directly 
through Maestro. Since January, he has hired  five more consultants: two United States citizens, two Indians and one 
Russian.  Three of the four employees on Maestro's Internet side are also foreign. Mr. Singh  said he valued a multi-ethnic 
workplace, where everyone sometimes sat around the  austere offices and shared a lunch of Indian takeout from Tandoor 
Palace nearby.  

''I hate it when I hear people refer to New York cabbies as mostly Indians or  Pakistanis or whatever,'' he said. ''That's a
 generalization.'' 

Companies like  Maestro ''understand the needs of foreign workers,'' said Jacqueline Miao, 20,  a Brooklyn College student 
from Malaysia who works as a Web designer for Mr. Singh.  ''Everyone here is a foreigner in a way.'' 

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Singh watched  over Ms. Miao's shoulder as she tooled around with a new home page design. 
Then  he walked to the desk of Sonia Kaur, 24, from New Delhi, picked up resumes of  several prospective consultants he 
planned to interview and stopped at the desk  of his brother-in-law Rajiv Lekhi, 30, to talk about plans for the company's 
Internet  service. 

His tasks completed, Mr. Singh paused at the door to his office and stared  out at the computers and workers scattered 
across the room. ''It's a revolution  we're going through,'' he said, ''and we are part of the revolution.''