If you believe the ads, Ajay Bhatt is tech's version of an arrogant rock star. The co-inventor of USB - the near-ubiquitous technology that connects computers to cameras and other gadgets - strolls into an office looking nerd-confident in a sweater vest, tie and a puffed-up, game-show-host haircut in a TV commercial for Intel. Women fawn. Metal music blares. A crazed fan rips his shirt open. Bhatt acknowledges his fans only with passing glances. "Our rock stars aren't like your rock stars," the commercial says. The ad was such a success that Conan O'Brien had Bhatt on the "Tonight Show" in October 2009. But there's just one problem: That's not Bhatt. Not the hair. Not the attitude. And, most strikingly, not even the person. In the Intel ad, Bhatt is played by actor Sunil Narkar. To meet the real Ajay Bhatt - an unassuming and introverted man who's much more Rick Moranis than Roger Daltrey - is to realize just how outlandish Intel's marketing team was when it decided to pitch Bhatt as a go-it-alone rock star. That's not because of the image, although the real Bhatt doesn't look like he's used many blow dryers lately. It's because, in reality, Bhatt has built a career and a successful technology line on the idea that the individual is far less important than the group. In his world, a person doesn't need to stick out and shouldn't stick out. As the new, 10-times-faster line of USB 3.0 products hits the market this year, Bhatt continues to believe in that group-over-self philosophy, even if he has become a rock star by proxy. Humble origins That kind of against-all-odds tenacity has been a part of Bhatt's life since childhood. He grew up in India, raised by a father who was an art history professor and an encouraging mother. They told Bhatt he could do anything if he put his mind to it. Often, he put his mind to breaking things and putting them back together - just for the fun of it. "I'm the kind of guy who buys stuff from IKEA" simply because it's fun to build things, he said. "I used to build a computer every year just to get a feel for it." In 1981, after earning a bachelor's degree in India, Bhatt left his home country for the first time to attend graduate school at the City University of New York. His only reason for choosing the school was that, as an undergraduate, he'd studied and liked an engineering textbook written by a CUNY employee. On his second day in the country, Bhatt said, he bumped into the professor on an escalator. "I came here, I talked to the professor and I said, 'I want to be your assistant.' " He went to work for him the next day, he said.