Software superstar
MY BIG IDEA
| He's proud that his first company Impetus Technologies is still growing "" and even more proud of the fact that the company has still held on to its first customer. |
| I WENT to school in Indore. From the very beginning, I was attracted by creation, planning and then building something, watching my idea take shape. When I was a boy, this took form in crafts and carpentry, but as I got older, I started to get into computers. I first began by writing computer games, but soon I discovered serious programming. |
| After college, I went to the US to do a Masters in Computer Science. I wanted to do something more pragmatic than writing theoretical research papers, even though many of my friends went this way and became very successful. |
| I built a software system as part of my masters thesis which got me hired immediately on graduation. However, despite this bright start, soon things soured "" my father became unwell, and being the only son, I had to return home. |
| Back in 1990, there weren't many options for employment in my kind of work in Indore. Partly out of boredom, I decided to start something myself and singlehandedly developed a software product. |
| Newspapers in those days used to churn out press releases from around the world on paper on big, lumbering machines. There would be paper and ribbon jams, the machines would run out of ink and so on. My product tackled this by routing 64 wires into one computer. This was the start of Impetus Technologies. |
| It got off to a flying start and I had an immediate selling success ratio of 95 per cent. I used to travel with a little computer, sell during the day and develop software in hotel rooms at night. This hectic schedule went on for about one-and-a-half years, but I still managed to get married in the midst of all that. |
| I started with no capital and no cash. I was working with around Rs 5,000 from my savings from the US. I had to rent my first computer and work in my father's old office. But soon I was able to recruit about eight people to work for me. |
| They would replicate what I did in terms of development, leaving me more time to market, write proposals and so on. Profits slowly grew, we could pay people more, and we continued to find good talent. And people liked to work for me "" not only were we doing cutting-edge work, our company was small, relaxed and friendly. |
| However, after about two years, I got tired. India was a difficult place to work then. Ringing a customer in another city could be a half hour's ordeal; there was no email; I had to send faxes, and if that didn't work, we even used to send telegrams. |
| But the straw that broke the camel's back was my trip to Rourkela, where I had to travel for five days, by air and rail, for half a day's presentation. Fed up, I decided to go back to the US. |
| I took a job with 3M in the US, and although I no longer had any part in the everyday running of Impetus, I was still involved; for a while, a large part of my salary was going on phone bills. |
| Finally, I left my job and set up the US branch in 1996. It took a few years to understand and cater to the US market and our first attempt didn't quite work out, but then we built another company in 1998. It's a leader in its field, and some of our customers include Sun Microsystems, Dell and Toshiba. |
| We could have sold the company in 2000 for a handsome profit, but instead we've continued investing; our service corporation, Servigistics, is still growing (we'll be 300 people by the end of the year); our development centre in Indore is still going strong. |
| It's still small by most standards, but the difference is that we're doing very different and cutting edge work in software development, and our size can even work in our favour, because of the unique, creative environment it inspires. |
| We've even recruited people from senior positions at organisations like Apple. We have come a long way from working weekends in my father's office in Indore, and it looks like we'll go even further. |