I have known Dev Khare for a while as the silicon-valley-based venture capitalist with Venrock, the iconic Venture Capital firm that lists companies like Intel, 3Com, and Mentor Graphics among its successful investment portfolio! Active in the mobile and web space, Dev’s investments included Slideshare (yes, that’s the company I wrote about recently, and that got acquired by LinkedIn), Appia, Turnhere, and Lavante, during his 5+ years with Venrock. Dev is quite unlike most other VCs that I meet, be it in India or the silicon valley. He leverages social networks super effectively to reach out to like-minded entrepreneurs;  he is active on Twitter with 3000+ followers and as many tweets to his credit; he is on Slideshare with 178 followers, and of course LinkedIn with 3000+ connects! Then he writes a blog (Nextwala.com). He has answered over 22 questions on Quora, where he has 700+ followers. A hard-to-beat act for anybody! Such is the enthusiasm and energy that Dev exudes for discovering the right entrepreneur who he would like to work with. It doesn’t stop here. His ability to connect and relate to entrepreneurs thereafter is also a tough act to follow; his background of having been a startup guy himself, with Covigo (a mobile middleware firm acquired by Symbol Technologies), seems to help him put himself in their shoes very easily. So, when I heard that Dev is moving to India, and that too to New Delhi, as a part of the LightSpeed Ventures team, I was curious to know what prompted the move.  From what I hear from my VC friends, Bay area and Silicon Valley is still where the action is, and India is perhaps where the valley was in the 80’s, with still a long way to go. So I decided to meet with Dev on my next trip to Delhi to hear from the horse’s mouth on what attracted him to amchi Bharath.

Dev is quick to point out that the availability of useful services online for social networking, shopping, job hunting, recruiting, finding life partners, entertainment, education and advertising are fueling people’s desire to come online…and there is a virtuous cycle between this trend and the ability of other companies to provide better and cheaper Internet access, mobile devices and payment methods.  The willingness (on the part of consumers and businesses) to spend on these online services is small today, but growing fast.  He also believes that the startup eco-system will start to mature and deepen over time, including a focus on high-quality design, crisp execution, lots more big-vision projects and more home-grown India-focused value propositions.    But, he says, we are still at such an early stage that there is a real opportunity to make a difference, and be among the small group of people who are driving change here. The  Indian market is more wide open given that the industry is in its nascent phase, and there are still only a handful of truly early-stage Indian VCs. And then of course, there is the lure of his hometown Delhi with friends and family that can never be explained with cold logic! Makes sense, and we will always love to see some good competition here within the VC community!

Dev is excited with the numbers that he sees in the mobile internet (his) world here. He is betting that the installed base of true smartphones (Android/iOS) will expand dramatically - from around 10-15 Million today,  to 100 Million+ over the next 2-3 years - what with handset & data plan prices expected to drop, thanks in part to the rumored 4G roll-out from Reliance that is expected to disrupt the telecom industry here once again (See http://www.nextwala.com/nextwala/2012/02/currentmobile.html). However, for this to translate into a real opportunity, he feels that it’s important that the apps ecosystem move out of its current dependency on operators, and learn to sell to consumers directly. Video,audio and gaming apps that show non-linear organic growth excite him. That is what he saw with Slideshare, where he was an early investor, and he hopes to see more such ventures coming up soon.

So what kind of founders/teams does he bet his firm’s money on? Dev says founders need to be aggressive, with an ability to “punch through the walls” when required. He likes to see founders who make it happen without giving excuses.

And when they see such teams, Dev says LightSpeed completes due diligence before putting the term sheet on the table.

Interestingly, he has already found one such team to invest in. I can’t reveal the name right now except to hint that it reminds me of jingling bells. So folks, watch this space for further news…

I have followed SlideShare and its founders Rashmi, Amit and Jonathan, from afar since 2006.  So, meeting Amit, when I happened to be in his neck of the woods earlier this week, was a no-brainer for me.  Thank you Amit. For being very generous with your time, and for patiently putting up with all my curious questioning :-).

First, something about the company, and their offering. SlideShare is the first web based service from India that has been a super-hit globally, and that too in the consumer world! It enjoyed the classic hockey-stick growth curve, organically, and with zero dollars spent on acquiring customers!  SlideShare was initially launched as a purely free service for sharing presentations.  Anybody could create an account, load his/her PowerPoint slides on to the SlideShare site, and share it with the world.  When it started, I remember thinking what a simple but useful service it was, especially for small businesses. They could use it as a very effective marketing tool to talk about what they did in an interesting visual manner - a content “youtube” for people who were not necessarily comfortable with putting out videos.   Soon they moved to a freemium model, with a premium paid account for power users.  Over the last few years, the product has evolved into a social network around content, including videos. So you can now follow people on SlideShare. It tells you how many people have downloaded/watched your content, and where you stand in the popularity chart.   Now a part of the larger LinkedIn family, Amit assures me that there are more things in the offing besides just the tight coupling with LinkedIn.

The talk around the VC circle in India, and one that I repeatedly hear, is that products, especially web-based consumer products, can never come out of India. So how did SlideShare buck this trend??  Amit says, modestly, that it was a mix of fortuitous circumstances that led to this “miracle”! Amit was your typical engineer, who went on to do an MBA from FMS and embarked on a career in sales & marketing with Asian Paints, Pepsi etc.  But, after trying it out for 5 years, Amit was honest enough to admit to himself that he was a techie at heart, and would never be happy selling colored water.  At the same time, Rashmi, his sister in the US, was also at a loose end having quit academics.  So they sat down in Delhi (yes, Delhi was the original start point) and decided to launch something on their own.  Initially, the idea was to build a product that would marry Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and the company was called Mind Canvas.  That was what the first set of engineers signed up to do. But soon, the idea of sharing presentations came up, and there was no looking back once they saw how quickly users were adopting the service. Thus it came about that Rashmi and Jonathan brought the consumer knowledge from the bay area, while Amit gave shape to the idea right here in Delhi. (Have we discovered a secret sauce here?)

So how did Amit build the first crack-team that any such cutting edge product requires? He confirms my theory that there is no easy way out, ha-ha; no recruiters who will bring the best coders to talk to you. Realizing that the first set of engineers would only join because they wanted to work for him, Amit went about the hard task of building his personal credibility. One medium that really worked for him was blogging. He wrote about technology, and built a strong following of hackers who were serious about working on cool technology. When they heard that he was hiring, a few of them came on board attracted to the start-up for the right reasons – the opportunity to make an impact by building a world-class product.  Another interesting idea he jumped on, was to host the first ‘barcamp’ in India.  Amit laughs when he recollects how cheezed off the Chennai/Bangalore geek crowd were, about Delhi taking the lead! The first barcamp attracted 100 techies  - a fantastic number that gave Amit a nice network to leverage for his hiring. If you are a tech entrepreneur aspiring to build a world class product from India, I would recommend you seriously follow Amit’s footsteps without wasting time on portals and recruiters.

Amit says that he paid market salaries from Day 1, unlike what you see in the bay area where engineers and executives take a 30-50% pay-cut to join a start-up.  He feels, and rightly so, that Indians are still very risk-averse, and are extremely uncomfortable working under ambiguity or facing failure.  So, it is a big challenge just getting them to join a start-up, even at similar salaries! L Or, he muses, we have perhaps not seen too many world changing, high impact, product or services startups that have happened out of India, as to motivate people to look at start-ups seriously??? He is clear that money cannot be the prime motivator, for 99% of the start-ups fail and it would be unwise to jump into the 24*7 work environment hoping for a pot of gold.  It will have to something much more than that.

How many women has Amit hired into SlideShare, given that the company is headed by a woman? Interestingly, Amit says he has never got enough resumes from women candidates, and he feels women are even more risk averse, gravitating towards more secure, safe jobs (Come on, girls!!). Even the 8 women they have today (out of a total strength of 40 people) have come mainly through referrals.  (Reinforces what I hear in other places - women are just not ambitious enough professionally, and are often content with lesser-than-ideal jobs). By the way, LinkedIn is organizing a women hacker meet (in Delhi again??)  As per Amit – hopefully, it will bring out the women geeks out of the closets in surprising numbers. You can look it up at http://developherdelhi.hackathon.io/events/home

What was the one trigger that got Amit to jump off the corporate bandwagon? He says he realized that as an executive in an established company he would only be ‘optimizing’ existing products and businesses, while his real passion was to build new products. He is surely lucky, for I see/meet so many people who are like him but then realized this a bit too late in life - when it becomes harder to turn back.

Now that LinkedIn has acquired SlideShare, is Amit looking forward to taking a break?? No! Not Amit, whose dream is to take SlideShare from its place among the world’s Top200 sites into the Top50 list.  Which begs the question  - how does his wife react to this?  Amit is unapologetic about, what he clarifies is, “his chosen way of life”, but hastens to add that he has learnt to build a balance and equilibrium now.  Saturdays might see him and his teamwork from home instead of physically coming to work!

Ramki Sankaranarayanan glanced at his phone one evening, to see an SMS announcing the arrival of Namit’s baby boy. The year was 2007, and Namit was this absurdly young founder/CEO of Prime Focus, a company that dominates the post-production film business in Mumbai. Once a salesman always a salesman, they say, and Ramki true to his calling, immediately picked up the phone to wish Namit, his erstwhile customer. What followed is like a fairytale. Namit asks Ramki about his startup and ends up pitching him to invest in it, as he believes that Ramki’s technology would nicely compliment Prime Focus’ content business! Ramki thought over it a lot, and eventually accepted Namit’s offer, giving him a strong strategic investor, with an existing customer base and a brand name across the media industry. Thus was born Prime Focus Technologies  (PFT), which has gone from strength to strength and, today, emerged as one of the rare successful product companies from India! Ganesh Sankaran, Ramki’s cofounder and fellow BITSian, joined him soon thereafter to take charge of technology, leaving Ramki to focus on the business side. 

Of course, while all of this seems so straightforward and simple, this has to have been one of the hardest decisions that Ramki has had to make on his entrepreneurial journey so far. Take money from a large strategic investor like Prime Focus…or go with one of the many Venture Capital Funds he has been in discussions with? The strategic investor option looks attractive, and gives him and his business a big leg up, with ready customers, a successful entrepreneur as partner, and a big brand name that can open so many doors. But, he will have far less control over his company, and one big operational investor to deal with and manage. Always, a very tough decision. And in the end, it’s always a judgement call made by the founder, and founder alone, and Ramki made the call to go with the strategic investor.

Today, in hindsight, Ramki believes he did the right thing…as it gave him access to a large customer base from Day 1. And, Ramki’s assessment of Namit turned out dead-on, as Namit has let him run PFT independently, with little intereference. It’s helped that Namit, too, had been a start-up entrepreneur once. The decision also shows Ramki’s leadership quality of being able to put company’s interest before his - a trait he demonstrated again when he chose to work out of Mumbai, leaving his family behind in Bangalore for 4+ years, because his customers are in Mumbai. 

So, going back, what got Ramki to quit the corporate ladder at the peak of his career, and jump onto the rocky path of an entrepreneur? He blames it on his Gurus at Tatas, FC Kohli and Ramadurai. He says that watching them create a totally new industry from scratch was a life-changing experience for him. And it was only a matter of time as to when he would set out at building something new himself. (Role models matter so much, don’t they…especially those in the early part of your career?!)

PFT is also one of those rare companies from India that is not a “me too” player. It’s platform, CLEAR,  is the world’s first hybrid, multi-platform, content operations infrastructure, on the cloud. CLEAR is a global virtual pipeline of digital media processing and delivery services, designed to transition media companies to the Digital era. Ramki says that he is amused when CTOs and CIOs of some big-name Hollywood Studios remark with disbelief, that “It is too good to be true”!!

But Hollywood was not PFT’s initial target market. As is important for any product company, PFT first targeted and met success with local Indian customers like Star TV, Vijay TV, UTV, and BCCI, before they went westwards. BCCI was, in fact, the first to try out PFT when it launched.  Using PFT, BCCI has created an online library of their video collection, that anyone can search and access from his/her laptop. Not a bad deal at all for BCCI, which is sitting on a goldmine of content that it would like to make available to the public. This kind of win-win partnership could be a great case study for what a good domestic market can do for start-up success and vice versa - something that is hard to come by in India. 

Ramki and Ganesh stress that it is their “systems” background that helped them architect a well thought-out solution platform for their customers. They believe that pure software engineers lack the multi-disciplinary expertise across video, audio and IT, that media companies require. This is the secret sauce that PFT has leveraged to build its technology. Ironically, it’s his background in IT services that helped Ramki steer far away from offering undifferentiated commodity services, and focus on creating a strong IP based business model!

Ramki is very proud that PFT has been profitable from Year 1. He says the company is very aware that they were not “born with a silver spoon”, and therefore the culture is not one of throwing resources to solve problems. Neither is it the “build product and customers will come” approach that most product companies take. PFT has been working with customers from early on to spec out its product, ensuring that customers are willing to pay for what PFT is offering. Talking to Ramki, you see why it’s always good for a startup to have at least one founder with a strong business background - he thinks customer, and cash flow, from day 1! Ramki is quick to point out, though, that he has enough technology in him to architect the entire product if need be! So it’s even more creditable that he chose to empower Ganesh and leave him to manage the Bangalore delivery set-up, while he holds the fort in Mumbai.

After capturing a good market share in India, Ramki and Ganesh are now all set to take PFT global. They have already launched in US, UK and South Africa.They have landed the first few clients in US & UK already. Ramki rightly believes that this is going to be their biggest challenge over the next few years. Media companies are famously known to be tough, demanding customers, and it is not easy to penetrate that world especially for an Indian company. And once in, they will have to deliver consistently, and scale effectively to quickly build on their early-mover advantage. So the next few years are very critical for Ramki, and PFT, as they move from being an Indian start-up to a global media technology company.

Ramki is very cognizant of this challenge, and believes that getting the right people in place who can support him and Ganesh, and empowering them to perform is going to be the key to success.  It is going to be very interesting, and exciting, to watch how Ramki leads, transitions, and scales PFT into a global player. 

If Ramki and PFT make it, as I am sure they will, it will be  a  feather in the cap not just for them but for the entire Indian technology industry. 

It was by happenstance that I came to learn about the Shriram Group and G S Sundararajan (Sundar), MD of Shriram Capital, the other day. Of course, I have known that Shriram was a huge player in the chit fund business and did a lot of truck financing. This only reinforced my image of the company as a traditional, Chennai based, family/promoter-run enterprise. Not the kind of company that I would typically expect anybody in my circle to be working in. So I was intrigued when I heard that Sundar, who had earlier led Fullerton and Citi’s SME businesses, had joined them recently. What is an IIM(A) alumnus, with an enviable track record with MNCs, doing in a hidebound company like Shriram? And what is Shriram’s gameplan here?

I decided to seek out Sundar for a meeting to get some clarity. And before the meeting, I did my own research on Shriram, and found, to my surprise, that:

1. Shriram is a specialist in serving the low income group. Most of its 50 lakh customers live in small towns, and it is the first provider of financial services to 98% of its customers! Given that it started in 1974, the model predates C K Prahlad’s “Fortune-at-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid” mantra by well over a couple of decades!

2. Shriram has a unique company culture where its people are empowered to take most decisions.  Its seven CEO’s, who head its different finance arms, have come through the ranks and have been with the company for 25+years!

3. It’s a darling of the Private Equity world with investors from across the globe (Japan, US, Europe) vying to invest. Interestingly, it has hard core PEs like TPG Partners and socially conscious specialist funds like Leapfrog as investors. 

4. Shriram Group has created a Trust - Shriram Employee Welfare Trust - which owns Shriram Capital. All employees who have helped the company grow are beneficiaries of this trust,  and therefore have ownership in the company. This happened recently in 2008.

So when Shriram Group decided that it needed to put its hat in the ring for a banking license, it was clear that it would be a Bank that would cater to the unserved needs of its existing customer base in the middle to lower income category. And that it would leverage its strong infrastructure of agents, branch offices and collection network to succeed. It appeared that their challenge would be to effect the necessary transformation that’s required to perform as a Bank, where the scale of risk and reward seem of a different magnitude.

Sundar confirmed this when I met with him, that his key charter at Shriram is to create the blueprint for a new Bank, which, unlike the rest of the private sector banks, would be focused on the bottom-of-the-pyramid. He said that he has always nourished the dream of building a bank that would demonstrate that the small and medium customers are a goldmine, and not a liability! And who could be a better partner for him than the Shriram Group, which understands this customer base and has proven the model in many different ways? So Sundar took the plunge, and now has his heart set on making this dream come true. He believes that, with the right mentoring and coaching (something he has done very effectively in his earlier stints), he would be able to morph most of Shriram Capital’s homegrown staff  for the new Bank. But how will he, a lateral hire into an organization where most managers have been around for decades, manage to get their acceptance?

Sundar is banking on his traditional middle-class upbringing, and his “no ego” workstyle to help bridge this chasm. As also on his years of training as a cricketer - he was captained of his university cricket team during his college years. He believes that the lessons he learned growing up - in humility, discipline, and team-play - have allowed  him to mingle with employees at all levels, and learn from them. His people have sworn by him in the past - when he started Fullerton, almost his entire team at Citi was willing to go work for him and, even today, they are just a call away. But then, at Citi, he had a team that he had built ground up, while at Shriram, he has a team that he has inherited. Can he repeat the same magic here?

We will wait and watch…and we will sure hope that Sundar, and Shriram Capital, succeed big, for this could then well become the model for a true Indian Bank!

I have met  many entrepreneurs in my life, including my husband who I have seen through three start-ups. I’m always excited listening to their ideas, feeling their passion and their hunger to achieve success. But I often find it hard to figure out who will eventually succeed, or even go past their first or second round of funding. Most times, especially in India where the market is ripe for any number of products and services, success or failure happens because of the entrepreneur. Not every founder transforms into a good entrepreneur and leader, but the few who do end up creating enormous value for themselves & their stakeholders, and oftentimes, transforming the very industry they operate in.

When I met Girish Mathrubootham, Founder/CEO of FreshDesk recently, I felt in my bones that I was sitting in front of one such entrepreneur! Girish is everything but a stereotype of a tech-entrepreneur that most of us would expect - He has no fancy degrees from fancy Institutes like an IIT/IIM/Stanford/UPenn. No Debonair looks. He has never worked in any blue chip MNC. Worst of all, he has no “airs” as the CEO of a recently funded startup:)

But you hear Girish talk, and you quickly realize that he is in a league apart. It shows in the way he has taken different career decisions in the past; it shows in his straight-forward, honest, and no-nonsense communication style; it shows in the way he has built his team; and above all, it is there in the calm confidence that he radiates. 

Girish’s first foray into entrepreneurship in ‘01-02 was a classic failure. He had given up a nice job in the US to return to India, and start a Software Training School. The training venture struggled due to the very negative sentiment that prevailed in India towards software jobs during that time (hard to believe now, but even colleges were finding it hard to fill up Comp Sci seats that year!). People were losing jobs, and very few firms were recruiting. Girish took a wise step - he decided to close his company down and get himself a job. I say ‘wise’, because knowing when to give up is a very important trait in an entrepreneur, and he had his clearly articulated reasons, like:

1. he strongly believes that a startup succeeds when it rides a wave (I couldn’t agree more) 

2. he does not enjoy working in a “negative” environment

3. nobody would give a bride to a struggling entrepreneur (Haha!)

As luck would have it, Girish landed in Zoho (AdventNet, those days) in a pre-sales engineer role. But very soon, he morphed into a Product Manager largely because his boss, Kumar Vembu, spotted his talent. As he says it, Kumar Vembu took him out for a chai one day and told him that an ‘authoritative personality’ like him should be a Product Manager, and the role was his if he wanted it. Girish did not wait to think; it sounded interesting and he signed up immediately, even though he had no clue as to what he was expected to do! But this transition surely was a very important fork in Girish’s career, for it introduced him to a “product”, “innovation”, “global market” scenario that most people working in India never get to operate in. 

Girish’s first strategic move was to focus on building a strong User Interface (UI) for the product, as he knew what a pain it was to learn/use products with bad UI from his training days. No wonder then that this product, OpManager, took off when launched at InterOp in Las Vegas..with users raving about the easy-to-use, friendly interface! And this was way before the iPhone/iPad days that have anyway brought UI to the fore in all apps today.  

Girish learnt his next lesson - on pricing and positioning - when a senior executive from AMEX came to his InterOp stall and inquired if he had a “better functionality” for a higher price for high-end enterprises like Amex! He realized then that it was critical to have different bundles at different price levels for sme and enterprises, because they want to be treated differently.

His product primer got its third entry when he went to meet a potential customer for his Networks Operations Management product. The customer was using an asset management product from a competitor and could not stop raving about it. He was impressed that the product was being “sold” so intensely by the customer. He decided that, henceforth, any product he put out in the market had to be so good that his customers would do the selling for him! 

So when Girish got ready to launch off on his own, he knew much of what he needed to do as he had already built 7/8 successful products at Zoho. No wonder then, that when he came across a Hacker News post on ZenDesk’s product pricing strategy, and on how the market was ripe for a better product, he could not let the opportunity pass. He roped in his colleague and friend of several years , Shan, as a co-founder.Very soon, he felt like he had to strike out fully, at the risk of giving up his pay check, as the “idea virus” was buzzing 24*7 in his head. And FreshDesk was born! (You can read all about it in his own words in his blog -http://tinyurl.com/79xrksb).  

Girish says his first team was all of people who had worked for him earlier.. And why not? Engineers by nature like to work for bosses who are “what-you-see-is-what-you-get”, and the opportunity to build a world class product out of Chennai does not come every day! So, how does Girish manage his team… especially now given that they are seeing a lot of action in the field with product launch, customer ramp up, funding and red-hot growth?? He says his philosophy is simple  - People need to feel happy about coming to work on a Monday. They need to like their job, and they will only like it if they are good at it. So his job is to figure out what they are good at by moving them around if required, or hiring them into the right role…a la Kumar Vembu, his erstwhile boss and mentor? He gives the example of how he hired his digital content man from a retail store where he was handling supply chain, his first job after completing MBA. Girish read his blogs, researched, and realized that it would be a win-win if he got him for managing Digital Content.  Today, if you go read the FreshDesk blogs, Twitter & Facebook posts, and all the cool marketing content that comes out from them, you will know what a good hire this has been! I was happy that I met a founder/CEO who does targeted hiring, and hires based not on brand value but based on potential…a theme I oft repeat to my clients when I hear them lament that it is so hard to find the right person for a job.  Girish then went on to say that he believed that there was no such thing as work-life balance!!…that there can only be work-life integration and that you have to like your job enough to carry it home with you! Gotta agree, as I have been doing it all my life:). He also does not believe in appraisals where you tell people where they passed, and where they failed. Instead, he believes in Achievement Reviews where he can discuss what they have achieved and what more they can do. Forward looking HR stuff that you don’t  get to hear much in India, especially in companies at this stage. 

Girish, I enjoyed meeting you. You are one positive person, and they say positive energy is viral. No wonder FreshDesk is blazing on many fronts in just a year, with customers across 40+ countries. Now with mainline VCs like Accel & Tiger backing you, there is no stopping you! Go for the moon, guy! 

Note to Reader: In case you haven’t already, you should read Girish’s letter in response to an allegation that FreshDesk is a rip off product..http://tinyurl.com/d5d3esq….It is a Classic!

I first heard of BankBazaar from Rajesh Subramaniam, who invested in them from Walden Ventures. He mentioned that they offered you the option of getting the best interest rates on loans, on-line without going place to place, something like what E-Loan does in the US. My interest piqued, I have been following up to see how they are shaping up since then. So when I got a chance to reconnect during my recent visit to Chennai, I went across to their office and spent a good couple of hours getting to know the company, and Adhil Shetty, their  Founder/CEO.

Adhil Shetty impresses you with his sincerity and his sense of mission. Those surely help to take your attention away from his boyish looks that are accentuated further by a mop of incredibly curly hair!  

Their nicely done, well appointed office in the heart of Chennai’s CBD also does its bit to make you feel that Adhil means business - that he means it when he says he is out to be the “Make-My-Trip of the Financial Services World”!

Interestingly, Adhil’s cofounder is his own younger brother, Arjun. Just a year apart, the brothers share a very similar background - schooling at DonBosco, followed by Engineering at Anna University. The similarity doesn’t end here, as both studied and worked in the US, and decided to return to India in 2007-08. No wonder then, that they joined hands to set up BankBazaar. Curious to know more about the  working dynamics between the two, I prodded Adhil to tell me more. Does Arjun follow what Adhil does?? Who does what within BankBazaar? Do they talk shop at home too? 

Contrary to what one would think, Adhil says that it is he who follows his brother at times! At work, Arjun handles the operations, technology and customer service while Adhil handles Sales, Business Development, Finance, HR and Investors. They avoid stepping on each other’s toes with this clear demarcation in responsibilities. It is Arjun who brings the domain expertise as he was handling the Co-branded Credit Card Program of Amazon, and knows how well online financial offerings could scale if done correctly. Adhil is on the road most of the time getting in customers, and says he hardly gets to meet his brother more than once a month!  He  may not realize it yet, but given how lonely it gets to be in the CEO’s chair, he is very lucky to have his brother around to share the highs and lows.

BankBazaar, interestingly, started out as a B2C portal offering online access to loan products from major players like Axis Bank, HDFC etc. It virtually shepherds a customer through the entire loan application process by taking the customer details, shopping for the right terms with competing banks, presenting the options and finally, getting the selected option to approval stage. However, the team was smart enough to realize that the B2C model will take time and substantial marketing to ramp up, as Indian consumers do take long to warm up to any online model. This was true even for ticketing and shopping, categories that have moved online over a decade ago elsewhere in the world. So, they decided to white-label the platform, and offer it to Banks to enable them to give an on-line access to their customers. This brings in the needed cash flow, and allows them to time the market correctly. This could be an excellent strategy, as we all know that online traffic will pick up eventually, and the underlying market is indeed very big.

Adhil is very proud of the team that they have built this far. His motto, while hiring, is to ‘go for the best’. They have had some good experience hiring from IIT (Kharagpur) and swear by it. Kharagpur to Chennai - sounds like a national integration theme :-). Unlike many founders I meet who think they can do everything themselves, Adhil really believes that his job is to recruit the right people, and let them do their job. He takes hiring very seriously, which showed in the quality time he spent with me despite having gotten back from a business trip just a couple hours ago. They have set up a development center in Bangalore just to attract the best engineering talent - takes guts to do this at this early stage in the company!

So why is he doing all this? The idealist in him answers that they want to build a world class innovative product, generate good returns, and share it with all stakeholders - employees, investors, customers and business partners. More Power to him!

I stepped out into the ever-sunny Chennai outdoors. Something tells me that these guys will do what they have set out to do - they have a razor-sharp focus which is half the battle won in any start-up. 

I am one of the lucky few who started my career with a start-up in India…a venture that grew rapidly, and could rival any bay area start-up of today in terms of excitement and energy! It is really hard to believe, today, that such a company existed in India and that too in 1983, but Wipro of those days was very much such a startup! (In fact, the global Indian IT companies we see today - a Wipro, HCL, or an Infosys - were all early stage start-ups in the 80s led by young entrepreneurs, exactly like a Flipkart or a MakeMyTrip, or an Inmobi is today). And Azim H Premji (AHP to us insiders), who was all of 23 when he started building Wipro, has done unbelievably well in building such a large, global, long-lasting company - one that even today stands out among its peers for its professionalism, integrity and corporate governance.

I have always been curious to know how AHP went about hiring the first set of key executives who worked with him to build such a great company like Wipro from nowhere. Imagine my excitement, when I came across one such person accidentally, and that too in Chennai! Mr M S Sekhar, a consultant to global companies like Wabag today, was recruited by AHP into Wipro in 1972, from IIM Calcutta. As I got talking with Sekhar, I put my real agenda for our meeting on a back burner, and prodded him to tell me more about his Wipro days. To my delight, Sekhar was as excited as me to talk about those formative days of his career. His first missive was: “Guess how long was my interview with Premji?” 2 hours? ”No!” 20 minutes? ”No!” Now desperate me: 1 Day?? “Again, No!”.  Sekhar took great pleasure in telling me how his interview with AHP lasted over TWO DAYS!! AHP took him through his plans, sharing how he had seen many more qualified and experienced candidates for the role, and showing him the detailed job advertisement he had released. Of course, what that did was to convince Sekhar to leave greener pastures like Levers, ICI, etc., and jump onboard an unknown company with an absurdly young entrepreneur like AHP!  

Many thoughts were racing in my head: AHP decided to bring in the best management grads even when he was running what was then just a small vegetable oil company! He took recruiting as a critical job, and was willing to spend two days of his time to make sure that Sekhar was right for him, and that Wipro/he were right for Sekhar! Even during those days, when family-run companies were fairly feudal, he was a thorough professional, sharing his plans, being transparent, and reaching out for people who were highly qualified, even more qualified than he was!

The next googly that Sekhar threw at me caught me completely off guard: I had always believed that my favorite ex-boss at Wipro, Ram Agarwal(RNA), was a finance whiz, having seen him all the time with a spreadsheet, and hearing him talk numbers ad-nauseum. Now, Sekhar starts with - ‘Do you know how Ram came into Wipro?’ He  proceeds to tell me that Ram used to be then at Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) as a systems/ IT engineer, and that it was he, Sekhar, who referred him to AHP and, hold your breath, for a Sales role! A sales role at Wipro for selling to consumers, which means distribution, marketing, retail, etc.! AHP then interviewed & hired Ram as his Head of Sales - yes, Head of Sales, that’s no typo! - and Ram then went onto establish the Wipro consumer brand, before moving on to head Corporate Finance, and then helping AHP diversify into Information Technology!! (you can read more about Ram Agarwal here: http://www.wepindia.com/aboutus/Md.aspx).

Aha! I thought to myself - so AHP believed that a high power candidate could do many things. He was willing to bring in a person with no sales experience because he believed that he was hiring a smart, intelligent, professionally qualified person who would figure out what needed to be done. And he leveraged him so well by moving him into different roles as he grew. Maybe that is why senior executives are known to stay for looong in Wipro - getting to do many different things almost like moving different jobs within one company. Actually, all of AHP’s hiring follow this pattern to this date - in 1984, he hired Mr Ashok Soota as President of Wipro InfoTech., when Soota had no experience whatsoever in IT and came from a manufacturing group like Shriram Refrigeration! Vivek Paul, who succeeded Soota, came from GE Medical Systems…and now, Azim Premji Foundation & University, his mega project focused on India’s education sector, has people from IT heading it! 

Sekhar was a sport alright, spending time talking about stuff which was nowhere on our meeting agenda, and that too on a Friday evening. Feeling a bit guilty, I decided to wind up the Wipro topic, but not before asking him to quickly recollect other things that stood out in his mind about that period. Interestingly the bits that emerged were:

• AHP preferred candidates who were NOT focused on work-life balance; Of course! Don’t we know that start-ups, especially the high growth ones, need 24x7 folks?! :-)
• He was generous with compensation, and paid as well as other MNCs in the market; Want the best and will pay philosophy?
• He had strong Corporate Governance framework in place from those days; Sekhar remembers the well coded “Conflict of Interest” policy!
• He would do regular performance reviews lasting several hours. Performance goals were well laid out and measurable, which made the reviews very objective.
• AHP made them all feel comfortable enough to disagree with him, and tell him when they felt he was wrong (haven’t seen too many leaders who can do that, have we? :( ) 

Sekhar fondly remembers how AHP used to get him and other senior executives to join him in his car drive to work, so that they could start work in the car!!

Sekhar still feels that joining Wipro was one of the best decisions of his life, and he learnt more in those 7 years with Premji, than he possibly could have done anywhere else!

And seeking out MS Sekhar, and asking him for a meeting, has been one of the smarter decisions of my life! I got to learn so much about our very own startup role model in India!

I started the week with a Monday morning meeting with a disarming Venture Capitalist, Kumar Shiralagi. Kumar is a Partner with IndoUS Venture Partners, a VC firm that is focused on early stage investments in India, and has backed some very interesting start-ups like Via, Myntra, Attero, SnapDeal, etc. Despite the fact that Kumar and I happen to be neighbors, and his wife Kalpana and I are good friends and yoga mates, it’s only now that I got to meet Kumar.

First things first. Whitefield + ITPL is a bad combination at anytime of the day, leave alone Monday morning, and by the time I made my way into Kumar’s office I was, like, god, I should have waited for a month, a year, anytime, but met him closer home!! But then, the welcoming  fresh bowl of watermelon and pineapple (nice, isn’t it?!) in his office changed my mood instantly. I must mention here that the IndoUS office is a refreshing change from the usual glass and plastic VC offices  we see all the time.

It is organized in a very informal way with nice artifacts vying to catch your attention. The fruits + interiors kind of make you feel that this one has a strong Indian DNA and is definitely not a “me too” copy of the West. 

So it made sense when Kumar mentioned that their second fund would be exclusively India focused.  I have always believed that India, and most of the developing world, need to evolve our own models when it comes to investing, building start-ups and identifying  leadership skills. Not a  bad idea to start with the office itself.

Kumar also is a very different profile from the traditional Indian VC. He has a strong technology background with a PhD and 23 patents to his name, that too in hard core semi-conductor device fabrication. He has paid his dues with a decade-plus of work  experience in Motorola, followed by Lytek, his own start-up in Arizona, and then moving on to a corporate venture fund like INTEL Capital, before launching his own fund with IndoUS. Very unassuming, and down to earth, Kumar describes his journey thus: “I did Engineering at NITK(Surathkal), worked at LRDE and then went to Arizona State for PhD; Worked at Motorola, did MBA, and then did my own start-up with INTEL Capital as one of the investors; Decided to move to India, and INTEL Capital offered me the role to head their India office; Then Vani, an old friend from ASU days and Vinod from being on Boards together, called me to join them, and IndoUS happened.” Hard to believe that you can transform yourself so many times in one lifetime! Makes me wonder if he would still pull some more rabbits out of his hat, or is Venture Capital going to be the final stop?

Kumar says the fund raising environment is tough today, and he should know better than anybody else since he should be done raising his second fund anytime now, I guess. If this is the case for somebody who has had a very successful track record to show with the first fund, I wonder what it would be for the many VCs with patchy records. Tells me that a second VC shake-up is well on its way. No wonder we are already seeing some movements in the VC ranks.

Kumar believes in being very engaged with his companies to the extent that some of his  investees even mention that he supports like a co-founder in their early stages. Again not surprising when you see his background. He says that Indian entrepreneurs are no different from ones anywhere else in the world. The execution part becomes more challenging as they have to grapple with infrastructure limitations, archaic laws and bureaucracy. ( In India we run steeple chases - sprints and marathons are for wussies:) ). But then, they have a little less to worry about when a FIDE ranked Chess player like Kumar (Yes he is that too, and in his words, that is another fluke!!!) is working by their side!! 

Nice meeting you Kumar, and I will still keep a watch for those rabbits for sure!