What changed for Rahul Narayan's TeamIndus when it moved cities

Narayan talks to Business Standard about how things changed for TeamIndus when it moved to Bengaluru from Delhi and why his daughter is no longer impressed by his mugshot in a newspaper

TeamIndus, Rahul Narayan’s start-up is looking to be the first team to land a rover on the moon, drive 500 metres on its rocky surface and relay high-resolution video and images back to earth. It is an audacious goal. If he succeeds by March next year the rewards will be huge. Narayan will bag the $20-million Google XPrize, the global competition that throws up impossible challenges for teams to achieve in its bid to create an ecosystem of players. The competition is only open for private teams and not government space programmes.

The inaugural XPrize for $10 million in 2004 for the first private effort to carry three people 100 kilometres above the earth helped identify players who went on to create the $2-billion private global aerospace industry.

Narayan says if his mission succeeds, India could replicate its success in IT and back-office services to become a global aerospace outsourcing hub. “The building blocks are there. Somebody has to connect the dots. The precursor for the BPO industry was General Electric (GE) setting up its centre in India. There were BPO companies before but with GE it was a defining moment,” says Narayan as we gorge on the starters — beetroot shami kabab — at The Druid Garden in north Bengaluru, a kilometre’s drive from his office-cum-assembly unit at Jakkur.

The Druid Garden, which has its own microbrewery, is a time-saver for Narayan and his young team, who otherwise have to travel through bumper-to-bumper traffic into the city to take their guests to other “cool” joints.

The Jakkur airfield, opposite the TeamIndus campus, is where the seeds were sown for India’s first budget airline, Air Deccan. Capt Gopinath’s dream of making flying affordable in 2003 disrupted the civil aviation market so much that Boeing and Airbus have been revising their plane forecast ever since.
 

Narayan thinks the global aerospace industry is ripe for a similar shake-out. Our conversation veers towards Elon Musk, disruptor of the day. The maverick Silicon Valley entrepreneur has disrupted the automobile industry with his electric car Tesla, aerospace industry with SpaceX reusable rockets and is looking to reimagine how people commute between cities with hyperloop and commuting under traffic-ridden roads with Boring Co. On Saturday, Musk unveiled an electric semi-truck that can haul 80,000 pounds or 36 tonnes. The billionaire Musk’s ultimate aim is to colonise Mars.

Musk is an inspiration for Narayan. “If I have to pick a person I want to be like, that person would be Elon Musk. It won’t be Jeff Bezos, probably not Bill Gates — he’s in a different league,” he says. The flipside: His young team also looks at Musk and compares his first attempt with that of Narayan. “The youngsters also are part of the global narrative. They ask why are we not doing a boring machine? Some of the future programmes that we have listed comes out of this restlessness,” says Narayan. In the same breath he also says, “I think Elon Musk is the wrong example because he’s boring tunnels and landing rockets and so many other things and everyone thinks that is normal. It’s not normal. He is a multi-billion dollar guy and a multi-multi billion dollar company is doing all of that.”

Narayan is realistic. He also realises the need for money-spinners. So the company is working on two projects — a satellite bus for custom manufacturing of satellites for global firms and a solar-powered high-altitude long endurance (HALE) drone.

These might be risky bets, but when it comes to food, Narayan doesn’t experiment much. “Nobody gets it wrong if you order Thai curry,” he says as we ask the steward for Thai curries — one chicken and one vegetarian —and two bowls of jasmine rice. We order three lime sodas alongside.

The GoogleX competition was announced in 2007; Narayan came to know about it two years later and managed to take part in the nick of time as the last applicant. A Delhiite, he studied at DPS R K Puram, and then went to IIT Delhi; he worked in software companies managing teams before he started reaching out to people to take part in the challenge. Narayan was able to convince his wife and parents of his dream over dinner-table conversations. The only advice he got was, “If you believe you can do it, give it a shot.” Narayan worked part-time for the first few months, before taking the plunge.

A bigger challenge was to battle the culture outside home. “Nobody wanted to believe we can do it,” he says. He struggled to get meetings in Delhi to convince people of his dream. “Probably it was a combination of the fact that we were very small, not too many people had heard about us, but it was tough to just get people to listen to your story,” says Narayan, who shifted to Bengaluru, the country’s aerospace epicentre in 2012. “Bengaluru was a welcome cultural shock. It was so much easier to make conversation. It was an interesting phase and it is part of the TeamIndus story that we happened to move to Bengaluru and happened to run into people who were far more accessible, open,” says Narayan.

Rajiv Mody, founder of Sasken Technologies, gave him office space to house the initial team. K Kasturirangan, a former head of Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), the architect of India’s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, became his lead mentor. Since then, Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani and Ratan Tata have backed Narayan, who has so far mobilised half of the Rs 450 crore he needs for the mission.

As the team expanded, Narayan began looking for a bigger office. In May 2015, when he was looking at the present workspace at Jakkur, the landlord did not want to lease space on learning that TeamIndus is in the business of satellites and space. For him, space meant Isro. A few days later, the landlord read Kasturirangan mentioning TeamIndus to a local newspaper and changed his mind. The regular mentions in newspapers and television channels also means that Narayan’s daughter, all of 12, doesn’t get excited any more when she sees her father hogging media space.

Narayan’s top team includes retired scientists from Isro. P S Nair, who was the mission director for Chandrayaan, leads the mission at TeamIndus. The spacecraft, to be launched on the workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) will carry two rovers — ECA (Ek Choti Si Asha or a small dream) of TeamIndus and Hakuto, from its Japanese rival in the Google competition. It also carries student experiments and a micro satellite that were selected through a global competition. There are three more teams that are in the race, but only SpaceIL, the Israeli team, has firmed up launch besides the Indo-Japanese duo on Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket.

Narayan is confident. What happens if you don’t come first, we ask. Narayan gives a sports analogy — it is like making it to the semi-final. “You can prepare for it, but you can’t control it,” he says how the “ExoMars Schiaparelli” the European Space Agency mission to Mars failed due to an error in the altimeter. The spacecraft thought it was 200 metres but was next to the ground and then “thump... it crashed”, says Narayan. The 600-million euro mission was nine months into the flight and failed in the last five seconds.

Narayan is aware of the criticism that TeamIndus is overambitious. He has adopted the peer review process of Isro and says this also helps him in meeting criticism. “If somebody comes here, does a review and then tells me these guys are hollow and blowing their own trumpet, that would be something I would accept,” says Narayan as the steward approaches us with the dessert menu. Home-made ice cream is an offer we simply cannot resist.

The waiter brings a bowl with one scoop each of blended cocoa, pomegranate and pumpkin ice cream. We dig in. There is a crowdfunding initiative that TeamIndus is planning where contributors can get their names sent to the moon and in return get a memento from the metal, which the spacecraft has been made of. Narayan is still short of money, but says the lack of funds will not hold off the mission.