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Category: NITK

  • Entrepreneur’s Interview – Metrix Line

    Sachi: Good evening, today we have with us Prashanth Kaddi – a NITK and IIM A Alumn
     
    He has since started the company called Metrix line. Without further delay lets request Prashant to give a background about himself and then explain about his company.
    Prashanth: Thank you,
    I am Prashant. I had a very studious background –my schooling at Kendriya vidyalaya and then moved on to do my bachelors in Computer Science from NITK in 1995. Through the campus placements I joined IBM. While at IBM, I looked at how the IT industry was working and wasn’t happy with it. So within an year, I got a call from IIM Ahmedabad.
    I had set a goal of being management consultant when I joined there; I got an opportunity to do my summer internship in the company – Anderson Consulting in their business consulting wing. I realized that just consulting wouldn’t give me what I was looking for; I needed more action in my work.
    While at IIMA, I attended a course by Prof Sunil Handa – Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation. I didn’t have a very clear objective of what the course would give me – the course gave me a stimulus into what I wanted to do in life.
    I joined ICICI from the campus placements, partly motivated by the education loan I had to clear. I also wanted to look at the marketing front of activities in business. I had a pretty good stint here – I was involved in many new financial product design and marketing. The impact of our work was significant – with a lot of results to show. The work I did was interesting, but I was not feeling excited about the environment – working in a large company. After having a stint in large companies this far, I felt I didn’t like working in large companies.
    Jump into entrepreneurship was more a decision from the head than the heart – I didn’t enjoy the stress levels that was building up which in turn prevented me from enjoying the good things that were happening around me.
    After 2 years at ICICI, I began talking with a lot of people – there were multiple groups formed focusing on different ideas. In one such group, I had found a batch mate of mine, who himself wasn’t very serious – but put me in touch with his senior who was keen on starting off. This partner of mine had begun working with a startup and stayed with its journey towards being a large company. The idea we began working was – governance of IT outsourcing. Having observed the business very closely at IBM and Mphasis (where my partner worked earlier) – we realized that
    1. It is a high value business
    2. It has a large amount of inefficiency built into it.
    We decided to use metrics and quantitative assessments, which could according to our estimates increase the efficiency by 10%. Nasscom was projecting the industry to be of $ 50 Billion – and say with 10% we would be saving $ 5 billion for our clients. So clearly the company product we were developing had the potential of being $100 million.
    We got our first consulting assignment in the same space – which could fund salaries of 5-6 people, we put together a small team – this was around end 2005. We came out with the first version of the product in 2006, two things followed –
    1. This version received a lot of resistance from the market and it wouldn’t fly easily.
    2. We would require raising finance to accelerate product development.
    From our friend’s experience and the reading on the internet we realized that the equity we would part for this purpose would be extremely high!
    The good thing that happened during this time was that a couple of companies we were speaking to began showing some traction – the challenge that these companies were facing was about the silos of organizing data. Each of these were understood only by certain group of people. Take for example – A product manager wants to get the P/L associate with his product; unless the finance person has the bandwidth to provide this info, there was no way it would be accessible to him. But this was an important feeder into the decision making about the product line!
    This was the space of analytics and business intelligence. Tough our platform was capable of doing this, but we had a very narrow domain focus. We realized that we needed to make the product more generic and this would help us get a lot of traction. Large companies hadn’t figures out the solution to this problem world wide – So this was a problem we felt we could solve for the world the very first time from India!
    IBM has bought a business analytics company for 6 billion dollars in 2008. SAP bought “Business objects” for 5.5 billion dollars. Harvard guys have begun writing about this too – a book called “Competing on Analytics”. These changes have happened over the last 5 years. In the book “Competing on Analytics” it is said that – product is no longer a differentiator – the only differentiator is going to be quickly you understand market trends and how quickly you could react to these trends.
    And everybody looking at there is huge growth market, and in in hindsight the traction was real. So today, we have a product which we call –a data to information platform – we have figures out how we are different from all other solution in the market, also differentiate ourselves in a competition from large companies like IBM, SAP or other dozens of companies that have emerges in the same space.
    Sachi: How are you addressing the challenge posed by the larger companies in the field?
    Prashanth: We could look at it in 2 ways – the technological angle and the business angle.  These are not by design, but have evolved over our years of business.
    In general, any data to information service provider would do the following 3 things
    1. Aggregate the data at a single place
    2. Analyze and Synthesize the data
    3. Interpret and Present the data as information.
    Traditionally, it was extremely hard to have an integrated product for all these – it was typically a combination of 4-5 different products. These had to be configured and programmed to work for specific organizations – this meant a large cost implications for the companies. The companies would have to invest nearly Rs 4-5 Crores before beginning, also the problem addressed was typically fewer in numbers. This was a huge pain point with users.
    We focused on this pain point and designed our technology to be extremely flexible with minimal programming effort at the customer end. This would make our product easier and faster to deploy. Our objective was to reach to zero-programming design; this has put us way better than many existing products. This was the differentiator on the technology front.
    Pretty early we realized that most of the enterprise IT solutions were moving to hosted and subscription based solutions. The poster boy of this move was – Salesforce.com. Lot of people were beginning to say – I don’t want to buy your software, I just want to use it – this was a shift from ownership to usage of a license. Given this, we decided to try out the subscription model.
    This decision helped us reduce the extra costs associated with trying to sell a high priced product. This was a differentiator for us from the business model point of view.
    Sachi: In your journey of the last 6 years, what have been your best and worst moments?
    Prashanth: Entrepreneurship is a crazy emotional ride with many ups and downs.
    One of our first down we faced was when one of our best product developers quit – that was primarily for money. Since we were a small group, this reduced our team size by nearly 10%! It was really hard to accept this for a few days!
    The second down side we faced was when we lost a client – we had engaged very close with a company; but then there was organizational restricting and the CEO with whom we were working was fired – the organization changed their complete direction; which made us redundant. We had even begun making some revenues and if the contract had gotten implemented completely, it would have defined our next growth!  2009 was anther hard year; we were close to closing 2 enterprise levels working with 2 fortune 500 companies. One of them fired 40% of their staff! What we had projected to achieve in 2009, we were finally able to achieve it in 2011.
    In 2009 when we came up with the product, the market was tanking; but we stuck to what we had decided to have our first 10 clients from among the fortune 500 companies. This would make it easier for us to sell to the 11th client. When we achieved each of these milestones – it was great feeling.
    Another high has been in the last 2 years, when we were in direct competition with the major companies. When we won contracts for specific products from this competition – it was a bigh high for us.
    In start ups, you don’t have the time to enjoy your small victories for a long time; you need to move on.
    Last year was the most memorable day for me – It was when we signed our contract with Microsoft. This was special for 2 reasons –
    1. They themselves had a competing product to ours in the same space
    2. They are the world’s largest product company.
    Sachi: How did you sustain in the last major economic crash?
    Prashanth: 2009-10 was really hard years. We had entered the market in 2008 and the product revenues had just begun kicking in; the services revenue was still with us. While the services helped us survive, the product side was severely dented.
    The crash taught us an important lesson – Our primary target at that time was the US market given the margins. We realized that over reliance on US was really terrible – since then we have tried to expand our business into a mix of developing and developed economies.
    Since we have subscription model for our product – it was in some sense was a recession proof business models. Though initially we stuck with this as a matter of chance, it proved to be extremely beneficial for us.
    Sachi: from this experience, what was your biggest take away?
    Prashanth: 
    1. When I look back I realized I was hung upon the Idea – which could be 100 million dollars; I didn’t want to be a small shop. In reality – you have to be there and do that, in order to say that you know. It cannot be based on imagination.
    2. Cash is absolutely king.
    3. Its ultimately about people – we need to take this aspect more seriously and learn to keep the motivation high and running. It’s ultimately all about retaining the best talent when you have little monetary buffer.
    Sachi: What is your message for the aspiring entrepreneurs?
    Prashanth: Start with a right motivation – it has to strong emotionally to handle the ups and down of the business. Do not take to entrepreneurship for reasons like – the glamour quotient associated or just for fun.
    As a broad principle having an understanding about the space is a good starting point if you are thinking of – this is for non breakthrough sort of innovations.
    It is important to manage the friends and families who would be your support line in this journey.
    Sachi: Thank you Prashanth, thank you once again.

  • Entrepreneur’s Interview – Taxi4sure

    Sachi: Good afternoon. Today we have with us the founders of Taxi4sure. Welcome to the interview Raghu and Aprameya. Could you please introduce yourself as the starting point of this interview?
    Raghu: Hi, my name is Raghu. I am a Computer Science Engineer from KREC Surathkal after which I worked at Texas instrument. I then did my MBA from IIM Ahmadabad, followed by a stint at Feedback Ventures. My hobbies include reading books, running Marathons.
    Aprameya: Hi my name is Aprameya. I have known Raghu from the past 13 years. We were being batch mates from engineering and I was a year junior to him at IIMA. I worked at Infosys before my MBA. Post MBA I worked for Jones Lang LaSlle where I used to head Business development for India so one of the vertical.
    Sachi: Could you briefly explain what Taxi4 sure does? 
    Raghu: Taxi4sure is an Online aggregator  of taxi, we intend provide a customers a one stop solution for booking any kind of taxis and for a operators  to actually aggregate their inventory and try to  get customer.
    For the customer, our value proposition instant booking of taxi, a choice of all taxi operators across cities, price advantage, reliability, safety and surity of the taxi when you book it one line. We identified this problem as a common one across various customers and our own experience. This is what taxi4 addresses.
    Loosely, we could compare our business model to that of make my trip of taxi or red bus of taxi.
    Sachi: In your introduction, you mentioned that Marathon have helps you – could you please explain?
    Raghu: When you jump into entrepreneurship, your income dries out and you begin feeling the pinch of it – it’s not as easy as you thought it would be. It’s when things are not going the way you expected that perseverance come into play. It is here that perseverance and determination helps you see through difficulties phase – This is what is akin to running a marathon.
    You hit a wall after cross around 30-35 km and all your physical energy has drained out. It’s only the mind that get you going – you tell yourself – just a little more and push harder. Similarly when you hit a wall in your entrepreneurship journey – You know that this is yet another race, another week, another month and you will be there.
    Once you hit the finishing line when you are really happy about it. Once you cross that, you feel you can still do another marathon.
    Sachi: Aprameya, How did you begin thinking of entrepreneurship?
    Aprameya: I didn’t have a predetermined intention of getting into entrepreneurship, I always thought of myself as working for some company.
    When at JLL I worked closely with CXOs of the company and department Head – this gave me an exposure to the everyday functioning of the company.  I felt this wasn’t very difficult and thought of trying it out. This was the best time to try it out before, your liability in life increase.
    The confidence that my experience at JLL gave me, and the timing are the two things that gave me the confidence.
    Sachi: Raghu, how did you begin this journey?
    Raghu: Aprameya and I used to discuss quite a few ideas across the table but there were always many “what ifs”. Then I thought let me give the idea 2 years – if  things doesn’t works out – we could get to work elsewhere; but if it works out then we didn’t have to worry.
    In hindsight, that was one of the good decisions we made. Since I have already done my post graduation it is kind of easy for me to compare. If you are looking to do a post graduation, you generally take a loan and spend 2 years working for it, but in entrepreneurship there is generally no loan that you take and the returns invariably would be higher than what you could expect after an MBA or an MS. If it hasn’t work out then too, you would have learnt much more about what works and what doesn’t than in MBA or an MS. From the learning point of view, having started off early in life helps – So it was an easy decision for me to make.
    If it works out, fine. If doesn’t work out I am not learn from it.  Either ways, beneficial – so I decided to try.
    Sachi: OK. Your business is an operations intensive business – what where the challenges the business that you faced and how did you go about fixing these challenges? 
    Raghu: Ours is an extremely customer centric business – our objective is to ensure we give an extremely good experience to the customer when he books taxis online.
    It is an operationally challenging business, and we attempt to ensure that the taxi customers’ book reaches the customer in time – in addition we focus on a very smooth experience during the journey.
    It is very different from booking a flight or a train or a bus – in these modes of transport, the customer rarely interacts with the driver. The role of the driver is extremely critical in ensuring a smooth experience. We are still attempting to reach this, we are positive of achieving this goal. Handling drivers and ensuring they provide a good experience is our biggest challenge.
    Apart from this, it is important to note that the taxi rental industry is extremely seasonal – it has very high peaks and very dry seasons. The technology, supplies and people to handle these is another major challenge in itself.
    We are very cautious in our growth rate, and our operators too resonate this vision. They understand that in our success lies their success. Initially it was difficult to get the operators to align with our vision but, as we have shown the effectiveness of this model, they are now more willing. They don’t regard us as competition but more as facilitators to their business. This was a major hurdle we overcame.
    There are many more challenges to solve, but the most critical thing that we need to focus on next is the drivers.
    Sachi: Your have scaled pretty well over the last 9 months of operation – how did you manage the finances for your venture?
    Aprameya: We began with investing our own money. Right since the beginning we have been extremely critical of the way we spend money – this has helped us look at alternatives we wouldn’t have found otherwise.
    We made sure that our employers are not driven by money alone but believe in the long term vision of the company. We have realized by our experience that whether it was a technology or call centre operations, over a period of time – the people who are stuck with us are those who actually believed in the long term vision.  Getting such people has helped us cut down our expenses. We pretty much have done a good job in terms of keeping our expenses low and keeping maximum benefits out of it – this very important to do that as a start up.
    Even when you go and rise investment later on your VCs or angels respect the fact that we have not spent too much to reach the current position.
    As entrepreneurs you need to be frugal, for at least one or two years, you are not  going to think about like going out on weekends or a trip somewhere etc. Whatever you spend on without thinking much right now has to be cut down. Give yourself a time limit so that you are not really bogged down by it.
    You need to be disciplined at the personal level, and this would translate to the company too. This has to be extremely important.
    Sachi: How did you develop the necessary networks and how did you leverage it to grow up?
    Aprameya: The initial networks that is always something that you grown up with. Our first set of advisers and investors came and our college from NITK. The first person who put us in touch with all the big VCs in the country is from our college IIM Ahmadabad.
    These networks have helped us initially, but then when you make new connections – you should not look at it as transactional. People need to buy into your story, and feel a part of what you are trying to establish. Once you do this, the network naturally builds around you.
    These are the softer aspects of network building that the entrepreneurs have to take care. Without people putting in confidence in you, you would find it hard to deal with various different unknown territories in business. You need to be out there interacting with the people, letting them know what you are doing. Media shouldn’t be the first point of approach, it is important to know the right people who matter for your business – media shall come if what you are doing is really worthwhile, i.e. if people are using your product or service, which investors seem to buy into etc.
    Raghu: When we began networking – we believed our idea is our IP – if we reveal it to someone, they would leave all their work and get to working on this idea. This I believe was one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs do at the start up stage. This in hindsight we believed prevented us from using the doors that were open for us! Idea is only 10% of the business, execution forms the remaining 90%; so just because you have shared your idea, people will not get to doing it.
    The second important lesson is to be at the right place at the right time, you will find the right place and time only if you visit a lot of places – and many of these wouldn’t be the right ones. You need to keep trying.
    Do not restrict your choice of meeting people based on their background; show them you are passionate about what you are doing. Even if the people you meet aren’t the right people to help you, they might know other who could help you. The passion you show, really rubs off on the people you meet. We have witnessed this in our interactions with both NITK and IIMA alumni.
    The more open you are with your idea and sharing it, the more you gain from this sort of networking. Networking doesn’t just help you in finding the right finance sources, but also getting the right people to work with and for you.
    Sachi: Maintaining a good relationship with investors is very important, how have you done this?
    Aprameya: Ours is an e-commerce portal that has a potential to scale up at an unpredictable pace. When you are speaking to people, don’t limit it to only those who can be a potential source of fund to you; discuss your idea, its feasibility, anyone  who has tried similar things earlier – this way you will get to know a lot of things other than just raising money. This way you create an existence in their mind space – it might not give you an immediate return, but you need to be determined.
    If you find someone who could be very influential, don’t waste time – just go meet him; without the expectation of any financial gains, or connections. Unless you tell everyone whom you meet, nobody would come forward to help you. This is something that we have constantly being doing since the very beginning.
    We never really looked at what stage of growth we are in – we never said we have these many transactions happening a day and so it is good to visit an Angel, or a higher number of transactions we go and meet a VC. We were never able to predict our growth. We never believe we have that extent of control of our business – in fact, being out of control in many ways is one sign of success in the initial period.
    When you have been connecting with so many people, you realize that someone has shown interest in you. If we would have spoken with an angel today, the transaction growths over the period of a couple of weeks or a month would have got a VC interested in us… It is extremely had to predict such things in our business.
    You should never restrict yourself to the number of people you talk to, or the kind of people you talk to. Talk to everyone you get across – you never know what kind of value each one will give you.
    Sachi: What is the message for aspiring entrepreneurs?
    Raghu: Message is simple – if you have always been thinking of starting off and haven’t done it this far, just take a two years break and start off. If it works out good for you, otherwise you would have learnt a lot. If you have an idea just go ahead! If you do not have an idea – don’t wait for a right one, work with multiple people that would help.
    Starting something all alone, and taking yourself through entire journey would be extremely difficult – If you have someone whom you really trust and respect, that goes a long way.
    Just for statistics, 75% of the entrepreneurs who have started with their first idea were not successful, but they were successful in later their ideas. Don’t wait for idea, get a good team and get start.
    Aprameya: Stop thinking about the pressures and liabilities you have in life – it doesn’t really help. In some form they are bound to exist.
    If you have thought of starting something, just go ahead and do it – give yourself a timeframe and move head. It would be foolish if you do it for five years and still not done anything substantial. Give yourself a decent amount of time to explore an idea, and don’t keep shifting ideas.
    Don’t keep shifting focus, and working on an idea and making it into a business is not as easy as one might think from the outside. It is important to give an idea the time it asks for! A simple benchmark could be – unless you are ready to spend one and half year on an idea, don’t start it. If you think it is worthwhile to spend that many numbers of years then you start and don’t shift focus.
    Sachi: Thank you Raghu and Aprameya, for taking time out. Thanks

  • Interview – SecurityXploded.com

    Sachi: Good evening. Today we have with us NagareshwarTalekar who runs the community website called SecurityXploded.
     
    Nagareshwar, could you please begin the interview with a brief introduction about yourself and then explain what SecurityXploded is about?
    Nagareshwar: Thanks, I am a Computer Science Graduate from KREC – Surathkal of the 2004 batch. I joined Novell before moving on to Citrix where I worked on virtualization technology.
    Since my college days, I used to do a lot research and publish articles in sites like Codeguru, Codeproject etc. Most of the tools I built during that time were all free. I grew more passionate about this, I felt I would need to have a portal of my own where  I could share the work I did – so I finally launched my own website – the primary objective being to share the research work which revolved around reverse engineering and security tools. The site was named – SecurityXploded.
    The first tool I wrote was – “FirePassword” which was incidentally the first password recovery tool for Firefox, I then wrote another tool, FireMaster to recover the master password of Firefox. I would constantly add tools to this website based on the reverse engineering – so the website continued to grow.
    I was more involved in Reverse Engineering stuff figuring out hidden things under Windows, undocumented stuff and write tools around these discoveries to make the system better.For example: One of the tools I developed was the ProcHeapViewer – whichcan enumerate process heap memory on Windows  much faster than the documented API functions – reducing the time from 20-30 minutes to just 10 seconds!
    This quality work began getting attention from a lot of people. The users were steadily rising.
    Around the same time, the work at Citrix was draining a lot of my energy and I couldn’t focus my energies on my passion of reverse engineering and tool development – This was around 2010. Around the same time – the movie “3 Idiots” inspired me to make the choice of taking this passion fulltime.
    I guess the timing was also right – I had completed 7 years of corporate career; I decided to go full time to work on SecurityXploded and also had intention to run a Startup later on if things go well. That is when I decided to quit my work at Citrix.
    I made this my first priority to complete the tools in my long to-do list and began working full time on it. These helped the website rating increase too –We grew from “Alexa Rating” of top 500,000 websites to coming in the top 100,000 websites.
    Today we also promote a lot of local and international security conferences bringing more focus and success to these events.We also have local monthly meets along with other security communities such as null, g4h, owasp etc. Since this January we have also started a free training on ‘Reverse Engineering & Malware Analysis’ delivered by experts from corporate firms and some of our core team members. This is extremely beneficial for anyone either students or professionals working in this field.
    Sachi: Tell us more about building community and how challenging it wasto start with?
    Nagareshwar:  Looking at the work I was doing, my friends approached – then some more people to put their stuff on the website. But that time it was more of personal knowledge sharing site. Then it stuck me that I can make it like Community Website where other passionate folk’s mainly young security geeks can showcase their work. It can not only help them to utilize the popularity of the website but also take their work to wider audience in shortest span of time.
    So I transformed it to a Platform for contributors to freely publish their work.To make it easy for the contributors, I adopted detached model (rather than volunteer-ship) where they neither have to work for SecurityXploded nor have any commitment from their side.
    The intension was never to increase the contributors, but to help youngsters get early recognition and grow at the international level. Today we have instances where people have got very good jobs having put up their work on the website. We cannot take the complete credit for this but it has definitely helped them to grow from no-one to some-one. That makes the difference!
    So we are not like any community that runs on numbers and volunteers – this model mostly works as a medium to inspire youngsters to aspire for more – become role models for others. This is where I derive my satisfaction and motivation to live for another extra day J
    This website has taken a lot of my effort into it – it is not easy. For Example: When someone submits and article, I proofread it, fine tuneit, add graphics etc–giving it that professional touch. This makes the article look far more professional than the original one. This takes a dedicated 4-5 hours of effort from the draft to final article. At the end of the day it is worth it.
    Some of the contributors are now part of our core management team and they work on Training, leading local meets etc. All these efforts have immensely helped us to cut across the Indian boundaries and to grow at international level with strong community support.
    Sachi: Your site operates on a completely free basis – so the consumes of your website have given extremely good testimonies to signify the work you are doing. Could you explain a bit about that?
    Nagareshwar: Currently, the portal contains tool written by me as well as other contributors. I specialize in writingtools; I can write tools faster than writing an article. Of course excluding the research work which takes significant amount of time.As of today we have over 80 security tools, nearly 70 of them developed by me alone. Some of these are also comparable to professional software from Elcom Soft. A major portion of these are password recovery tools, and most of the users are from the US, Europe and India. Over the last year, the downloads have also increase in line with the growth of the site ranking.
    Our tools are recognized & published by leading downloading sites like Softpedia, Brothersoftetc and given 5 star rating, editor pick awards etc. Around 5 of the tools have crossed over 100,000 download mark. Our best tool, Facebook password tool has crossed over 800,000 downloads in just 14 months! Imagine if we had charged $1 for each download and assume 10% conversion – we would have been far wealthierJ.
    Our users are either home users or professionals spanned across the world, but last year we had one special person – who works in Forensic investigation at Police Dept of Delaware County, USA. He wrote to us thanking for our Password Recovery tools and how they have helped in his forensic investigation. That was one of the special moments and he later sent us testimonial also which is featured on our site. Another memorable testimony was from the president of CompUSA – for our SpyDLLRemover tool. We have also received nice words from couple of security community founders citing our good work.
    These testimonies inspire and keep us on our tows all the time.
    Sachi: Your website operates on a completely free model, and you haven’t worked for the last one and half year. How do you manage your finance?
    Nagareshwar: Yeah, frankly it has been difficult period. It is not easy to convince people at home – saying you are on our own, running a community etc. especially in the Indian context. More than the money part, convincing at home was most difficult task and people are still not convinced.
    I had planned that; this activity would take substantial amount of time and so had been saving for a while. I am not married Jand have noother financial liabilities too. The internal urge was getting stronger, and I knew I had to jump in full time at some point. I expected it to be difficult and had planned my finances for a year or so.
    At the SecurityXploded end – the major cost for us was the hosting – it doesn’t come free. Initially I paid it from my pocket, but later on it become difficult when last year we moved from shared hosting to dedicated-hosting. Now the advertisements and promotions help us to cover the hosting cost.
    It is the satisfaction at the moment that I derive. And finally what goes around comes back around.
    Sachi:  You have been doing this for the past 4-5 years, it takes a passion to do something like this.What drives the energy for you?
    Nagareshwar: Yes it has been nearly 5 years. Initially, it was a difficult especially when you try to manage your full time job along with it.
    The sort of reverse engineering I do, generally goes for days often weeks together –you constantly concentrate on the binary numbers on your screen.Once the research work is completed, it will lead to new tool or article. This takes a lot of work and energy. It is primarily the passion that has kept me kicking all these years. Inherently I am blessed with lot of energy and passion that drives me to do things – I guess it’s a God’s gift to me which helps me keep running.
    Sachi: What is your message for aspiring entrepreneurs?
    Nagareshwar:  The most important is – pursue your passion.
    An entrepreneur needs to look beyond the monetary gains. An enterprise cannot be built with only money as the motive. You would have to be passionate and believe in your ability to pull off things that you dream of. Only this can help you sail in the tough times and surge ahead!
    Sachi: Thanks Nagareshwar, thank you once again.

  • Entrepreneurs’s Interview – Sen6

    Sachi: Good evening, today we have with us Smruti Parida. He is the founder of this company called Sen6 networks along with his batch mate from NITK Suratkal – Vinuth
     
    Welcome Smruti to this interview. Could you please let us know your background and then tell us about your company?
    Smruti: Hi, my name is Smruti; I am computer science graduate from NITK Suratkal, from 2005 batch. Immediately after my graduation, I was joined United Online.
    United Online was a small 400 people company in Hyderabad which works in the area of email protection, spamming etc. For two years, it was a very good experience working on the basis of internet infrastructure; and definitely a high learning phase. I really experienced the potential of internet and its ability to bring convenience on a scale unthought-of.
    After this, I moved on to Microsoft, where I worked for 3 year; I had the opportunity to work on “Bing” – the search engine. While working on this project I understood the way in which large projects are handled – how the efficient strategies could help achieve significant results. These learning were always happening.
    I also began thinking – what does ambition mean for me? What would be my vision for life etc? After 5 years of working for these companies, and thanks to circumstances – I decided to take the plunge into entrepreneurship.
    Along with my cofounders, I started Sen6. The idea of Sen6 has changed since the initial thoughts we had. All of us cofounders were technical people and with a background in internet technologies. We firmly believed that internet had the potential to break barriers and make people act smarter and more productive. Since one of the cofounders had an inclination towards arts, we decided to start working with this focus. Our objective then focused on empowering the artist so that the artists in remote areas can reach out to the rest of the world easily. We now envision ourselves as creating an e-bay like platform for Indian art.
    Through this platform we would be democratizing the whole art scene in India and get to the forefront many talented artists and their original works which are inaccessible otherwise. The platform would attempt to put the middlemen and advisors, consultants etc – this could thus disrupt the existing structure and make the whole scene transparent.
    Sachi: You told your cofounder was instrumental in getting to operate in this domain, Could you just tell us about how you met your co-founder and how it started off?
    Smruti: I didn’t do too much homework in choosing the cofounder – he was my batch-mate at my engineering college. Both of us joined United Online together and while there, we were also housemates.
    We found that our frequencies matched. We tried doing things part time, however since our interest would quickly shift from one to another, we failed. That is when both of us came to the understanding that starting off something would be only possible when we are full time on it.
    While there could be an analytical way to find a co-founder, for met it is the pre-established connections that helped. We used to complement each other well and that was something that helped find the right team for us.
    Sachi: Since you operate in the business that deals with Art Industry. Could you just brief tell us art and how the art work?
    Smruti: I would be very frank that we do not understand art industry completely. The understanding we have got is by reading, meeting artist, and people who deals with architect, interior designs, art galleries etc. So we would like to say that our understanding could pretty much be wrong but I shall talk about the problem we address.
    The consumers of art could be at any place, at your home, hotels, resorts, or art gallery – where you see paintings. It is generally the interior designers who really get these art pieces into these places. The kind of art that these interior designers get is called affordable art. But still art in general hasn’t been accessible to common people.
    One of the reasons for this is that Artists are generally not the people who would like to market their work – they are happier exploring their skill. There are people who purchase art at a value which is much lesser than the market value of the art and make profits out of the deals. The price differential between the 2 is extremely broad.
    There are lots of middle men who operate in this business, and generally art continues to remain accessible only to a small set of people. We want art to be accessible to common man – we do not want art to be considered as something that could decorate the walls of your home. There is lot of very talented artists whose work doesn’t get recognized – primarily due to the accessibility or lack of discovery platform. We want to be that discovery platform.
    Reports say there are nearly 30,000 not so noted artists and trough the online platform we intend to give them a larger customer base to derive value for their art pieces.
    Sachi: In the last one and half year of operations, what has been the major learning? Do let us know some of the major mistakes you have done and how you overcome these?
    Smruti: If I am to look back and think if the work that I have done this far – I feel I have taken longer than usual to accomplish this.
    One of the initial mistakes was with us taking a long time to open up our minds – As said earlier, we were technical people and when starting off a business it requires a complete change in the thought process. It took us quite some time to get this realization. It would be of enormous help if this mindset shift occurs before you start your business.
    As a business man, you would need to get to meet various people; understand their minds and only then will you realize that the way your consumers perceive your business. You need to be a salesman of sorts. In our case, we had to meet a lot of interior designers who are comfortable with the current way they do their business, then you go to them and talk about the platform which has features they might not need! You need to be persuasive, and not expect that things would happen naturally. It always helps if you can make a strict routine.
    What we had done was building the product that we believed had to be the best in the world – but we now feel it would have been better if we began entering the market and showcasing the platform to people much earlier. Dividing the work and continuously being persuasive is what we learnt in this exercise. We are now smarter with this experience.
    Having said that, as an entrepreneur, one is generally curious and wouldn’t follow the book; it is only when he has attempted and learnt from the mistake that he really learns it. It is really this characteristic that differentiates them.
    Sachi: Your business has 2 parts to bridge – one is the artist and the other is the purchaser of these art pieces. How did you go about bridging this?
    Smruti: It wasn’t really a big problem for us, since our business was attempting to get a business model that had worked in the west, it was useful to learn from their experience and use it into the Indian context.
    We found quite a few Indians who use these international websites to sell their work – we wrote to them and able to get them signed onto the platform. The appreciated our efforts to target the Indian Market. There are nearly 5 lakh other people across the world who also used the same platform and when we started sen6, they felt there could be a good recognition for their creations.
    Given our culture and traditions, only an Indian could understand and appreciate Indian Art, the larger western audience couldn’t appreciate this to a large extent. So this problem wasn’t a very difficult one.
    Sachi: How did you get through to the paying customer?
    Smruti: Once the artists signed in, they asked their regular purchasers to use this platform to make the purchase of their art. So the initial set of our orders were received that way.
    We did some online marketing through Google Ads, Facebook etc and these campaigns helped us get a few more orders.
    We are currently working on building a B2B connect for the online portal.
    Sachi: How would Sen6 be in say three years time?
    Smruti: Our study indicates that there are 30,000 artists in India who constantly generate new art, so we are targeting having around 15,000 of these artists on this platform.
    We want to create a brand for our self in the home-buyer section of the business through the convenience that Sen6 intends to provide.
    We also want the large B2B buyers using sen6 for their business and professional needs.
    Sachi: the customer of you platform could be anywhere across the world, how do you manage the logistic if you do manage it?
    Smruti: Currently we operate only in the re-production print and fine art prints of original works business and not in the original painting sales. This is to keep our self in line with the affordability focus we have. In this model, the digital copy resides in our secure store and when a sale is concluded, we take care of printing and shipping the product. We accept the payment and then transfer the artist his share with a 15 day time period.
    For original painting, the costs of these would be much higher and we would handle the logistics when we get into this segment of the market. Currently we are staying away from this.
    Sachi: What is your message for the aspiring entrepreneurs?
    Smruti: If you are aspiring to be an entrepreneur, this is probably the best time for that in India. If you have a curious mind, you will find lots of problems in India, which need to be solved. Be patient and continue perusing – you will definitely make enough money – and in fact even more than what you could have earned otherwise in a job. It is all about taking the bold step of leaving your comfort zone and coming out. And then keep learning, be courageous, know your mistakes and adapt to the changes.
    Sachi: Thank you Smruti, for coming down to this interview

  • Entrepreneur’s Interview – Edu next ventures – A Finishing School business

    Sachi: Good Morning, Swaroop and Vivek, Thanks for coming in for this interview. Swaroop and Vivek are founders of “edu-next ventures”, which operates in the education space. 
     
    I would like to begin the interview with getting to know your background briefly before you could proceed with what edu-next does.
    Swaroop: I am basically from Bangalore. I am a graduate of KREC Suratkal, and then I did my MBA from IIM Bangalore. I then worked with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) as a consultant for a short while and then I moved to Dell Analytics where I worked in their marketing analytics team. We are now running this venture called Edu-Next which essentially a finishing school for business graduates. We have been working with business schools in India, to provide a careercounseling and mentorship to help students decide better as to what job they would get into and how do they mould themselves to ensure that they get the job.
    Vivek: Hi, this is Vivek and I am a graduate of KREC Suratkal,batch of 2006.
    Sachi:How did the idea of finishing school come to you?
    Vivek: During one of us when brainstorming at IIMB we decided that we would work in the space of education and for obvious reasons we landed at the idea of finishing schools – because it is right at the surface. We wanted to skim the surface first and then see how we can work in the other areas in education.
    In terms of how we came to the idea itself – India being a very competitive environment does not give enough time to people to think about what they want to do in life? or how they move forward? where they want to grow? What they want to do for the rest of their life?
    They are in a hurry and experience enormous peer pressure – thisdrives most career decisions. People do not reflect and think what they done in the past, what they are doing now and what is the personality type, what are their carrier goals, what they can do, what they can’t do, what are the strengths and so on. They approach placement and interviews in a rather unprepared or underprepared fashion. We have also gone experienced similar things.
    Individually for me the dilemma was – MBA or no MBA? Should I stick to my own domain or move to something else?How do I shift?What do I need to make this shift? Where do I shift to?These questions are commonplace –especially once people start working. So we want to address this first at the post graduation level and then move to even more impactful level – under graduate and then Pre-University.
    In an education driven society like ours, it’s very important for people to make the right decisions about where they want to be, so that they can deliver the best and not be unhappy about where they are, or the decisions they made.
    Swaroop: One of the reasons why we got into this space is that I am personally very passionate about education.
    I have also seen a lot of heart burn with my own batch mates in MBA who honestly felt very lost!We took the job we got out of campus. But somehow the ability to say this is what is important for me, this is the kind of person I am and this is what I want to choose is lacking even in the best Institutes – We want to reduce that heart burn.May be say after 5 years of working post MBA, how do you ensure that you are doing the right thing? How do you ensure you are happy?
    Thesearenot easy questions to answer! And each one has his own questions and must find his own answers. We are trying to use different ways to get students to think and make them ask themselves these questions – we provide a platform for them to make the right choice. This was the primary reason we started this venture.
    We alsorealize that sometime it’s too late at the MBA level to take these decisions – Probably they are better off beingmusicians. But that is the question we will answer later. Given that fact that you are doing a MBA, how do we help them to make better choice?
    Sachi: It was pretty clear about how you went about starting it. 
    You are targeting the PG section of the education system, and you also realize that most of the career choices are made at the +2 levels.How are you addressing that at the movement?
    Swaroop: We are not addressing that at the moment, because we need to learn a lot in that space.
    The approach would be slightly different because we still are in a society that promotes engineering because it give a job that pays Rs. 25,000/- or promotes being a doctor. What about being a physicist or mathematician or an artist or a star. While there is increase consciousness that people can have different kinds of career choices, we still are not mature enough to accept some of these things. We have to still figure out a way to address this problem.
    There is a sufficient heart burn in MBA world itself for us to address the problem and establish ourselves as a provider of quality career services or career guidance and then we will work at scaling it to other sections of education.
    Vivek: Primarily post graduation is one venuewhere you are not left with many choices– a PhD or a job. So there are very few things that you can have to choose from after post graduation,and that is where we are saying what choices they have made; learnmore about these people and then probably move to under graduation and others.
    Sachi: What is your vision for Edu-next?
    Swaroop: The first,I really want Edu-next to be a respected name in the space as – providers of quality career servicesand career guidance/ counseling. We have some challenges I would like to address.
    Firstly there is always a distribution in terms of quality of students. Our challenge is to understand this difference in inputs and be able to cater to the difference needs that different kinds of student have. If you take a tier one B-school and comparing with a tier four B-school, the expectations from the course, what is available after the course are so different. We cannot apply the same logic everywhere. So for us able to figure out how to suggest the correct thing for a person is one challenge that I would like to address, and that would go a long way in building our reputation.
    The second thing is we are inherently a very people driven business. The biggest problem is how do you scale something like this? Can you build enough tools and bring in enough technology so that sitting out of one city in India we are able to reach a large population. How do you start adapting to different contexts – I don’t even want to restrict it to India, how do you address somebody in US or Brazil or NewZealand?We want to make it a very large forum for people to come and get this service. That is what I am really looking at from the ‘B’ school angle.As far as rest is concerned it is still work in progress, we will keep you posted.
    Sachi: This question is not directly related to edu-next but would love to ask you – What motivated you to be entrepreneurs?
    Vivek: I will be very candid about this. Soon after Engineering, it is a lot of multi pronged peer pressure that you see. Friends went on to do M.S, went on to do MBA and other things – some studied Mathematics, some stuck to their own domain and completed their masters and somebody else doing PhD and othersstuck to their own job. The people in the job would slog it out from 9 to 5 and go out on weekends – Even I went through the same things straight of college. We worked hard and but still like everybody else who has hungry to do more, especially from a college like ours. We had to do something more to satisfy – Probably do much more than what we are doing at present.
    MBA? M.S? I asked all these questions to myself and I could not answer most of them well – after a post graduation what next?And given the personal choices that I have made such as where I want to stay, what I want to do and amongst other things, it was not an easy decision to make. Entrepreneurship was also a buzz word during an early 2000, and is even now. We just dabbled with few things – trying to do that, trying to do this. It was more experimental, not knowing where the journey will go.
    Being a first generation entrepreneur, it is not very easy to push yourselfto quit your job or do something of your own. Soon I started enjoying the process and not knowing where I to go, itself was fun. You can push yourself that much harder in not in terms of effort but in terms of how much we can take? How many things you can give up?
    You generally compare yourself with peers who after MBA buying cars left right and center, Going to the Dalal Street and getting their pay packages. You are still stuck between a Volvo bus and a BMTC normal bus or even an auto rickshaw because you cannot afford to.So this is a hard decision to make. But that is what probably is the right choice! You know once you have made the right choice.I think you will have to experiment a little, not everyone is sure what they want to do unless they try different things. So I started doing whatever I have to do being my own.
    Swaroop: I am a crazy control freak!  I cannot work for any one. Money is an obvious issue, we will all make money eventually. A very close friend of mine says “we will all die rich”. I have immense faith in his statement. So money is a motivator, as is the immense wealth to be created as part of running your own business but I think the greatest kick is that “I decide what happens to my company, my fortunes”. That is the primary reason why I started off on my own. Opportunity wiseI didn’t have any problem; I could have gotten any job I wanted but that wasn’t what I was looking for.
    Sachi: In your journey of entrepreneurship, what are the learning that you havethis far?
    Vivek: I would like to keep it extremely crisp– In terms of the learning, know what you are trying to do, have the right people with you, stay in touch with all your friends especially entrepreneurs who have taken the off-beat route, because they are the one who can talk with and probably you can relate to. It is extremely important to prioritize as an entrepreneur.
    Swaroop: It is ok to not know really where you are headed to and you will figure out along the way. The most important thing is to ensure that working with people who are right for you. There are certain kind of people whom you can work with and certain kind of people you cannot!From personal experience I can tell you that it is very important to choose your team right. It is a good team that can pull off anything.
    The other thing is you have to build good will along the way. It is very difficult especially when you have graduated from a top tier Institute.You tend to come with this baggage of entitlement, I am from here, and I have to be given this. Very quickly I have learnt that unless you have something of value and you can prove it, nobody is going to give a damn that you are from certain Institute, or you have gotten a certain degree. It’s humbling in that sense and I am better off now. I am very happy I got rid of my excess baggage that all good institutes put on to you when you graduate and that’s been the best learning so far.
    Sachi: What is your message for aspiring entrepreneur?
     
    Swaroop: Like they say, the fastest way to solve a problem is right through it.Unless you get in, you are never going to solve the problem.I know lot of people who sit at the dinner table and say, I have got this brilliant idea, I have got the excel sheets, I have got the ppt, I know the VC and all that – but you just frustrate yourself out! Sitting with all the plans and complaining about how corporate life is not or you.
    But If you are not goingto jump in and do it, it’s not going to happen. You have to have reasonable plans etc all that jazz would be there,but the tipping point is to say, I am going to get out tomorrow, I am going do this for a while and make sure it works.
    We have tried this part time and it doesn’t really work.We have to do it full time and give it what is due. And at least I realize, the faster you get in, the easier it is – because, as you get older, fatter and slower and richer, entrepreneurship becomes more and more difficult. It is like trek to Manasa sorovar. It is best done when you are fifteen. We could possibly do it only by 30. Anything later you might succumb to heart attack, so do it quickly.
     Vivek: I have two things,
    One – If you have worked in a corporate set up before, and learnt to de-jargonize. Big organizations jargonize to prove their worth! Keep it simple.
    Second- Do not fall into the trap of theory of entrepreneurship. If you have a good idea and you think you can pull it off and if you can prove to yourself that you can do it – Forget the scaling, forget everything else. I mean, how would it grow? Will it become a billion dollars business? All such similar questions – probably a hundred of them. The first starting point is you need to be convinced about the idea itself. These points might have been studied, but don’t go by the book at times, do it yourself. It is ok to go off the book that you can always come back and join later on.
    Sachi: Thank you Swaroop and Vivek for this wonderful interview.