Hope it will be of some interest........... :P
Some e-alumni of IIM Bangalore
Ravi Venkatesam ('97)
Amardeep Lakhtakia (Lucky)
Sanjay Anandram ('91)
Balaji Pasumarthy, Businessgyan
Arun Pai, Passionfund
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Ravi Venkatesam ('97)
To listen to best friends Ravi Venkatesam and Ranadeep "Ronnie" Ray talk is like listening to a series of highly quotable soundbites on entrepreneurship delivered by a new age management guru. Sample these: "In business you have to bet on the future. You can?t let the past and social conventions constraint you"; or "You must have passion and be driven in your mindset to succeed"; or even "However bleak things look, there?s always a way out" or "you can?t learn swimming without getting into the water"
But Ravi and Ronnie are not in the soundbites business. They are driven, motivated, and passionate entrepreneurs. And all of 30! They impressed no less a person than Sabeer Bhatia so much with their Internet idea and drive that he acquired their company and made it a part of his new venture, Arzoo Inc (
www.arzoo.com).
Their?s is a story of raw passion and drive to make it on their own. They met at IIT-Kharagpur over a decade ago where Ravi was studying to be an architect and Ronnie a mechanical engineer. Sometime during their 2nd year, they figured that the future lay in being independent without constraints. Says Ravi, "I always wanted to be independent, right from an early stage. I wanted to be in software. I didn?t enjoy architecture at all" while Ronnie adds, "Y?know I wanted to be a scientist till I was about 15. Then after reading John Sculley?s "From Pepsi to Apple" at IIT, I decided that the future lay in computers and business, not in being an A+ academic."
Post IIT, they went along fairly traditional career paths. Ronnie joined HCL in sales and Ravi joined Infosys after a year with TISCO. Subsequently, they got their MBAs from IIM-Calcutta and IIM-Bangalore respectively. But the entrepreneurial bug was well, bugging them. One day in 1996 at a party in Bangalore they said "Yes!" to Kamal Sagar, an architect and batchmate from IIT, in response to his offer to join the real estate business! "We don?t know why, maybe it was the drinks, but we were keen to do something and had been discussing various options. So when Kamal asked us, we said "Why not?!"
So, in 1996 "Total Environment" was born."We had no idea of the real estate business and had no clue about what we were getting into. That was just as well, else we may not have founded Total Environment! Our objective at Total was to be the one stop shop to meet the housing needs for professionals like us. We took care of everything from land, financing, to finally handing over the key. We roamed around Bangalore searching for land to buy; Kamal knew someone who had land to sell, but we had no cash to buy the land. So we called up our IIT batchmates and told them about Total Environment and our need for money to buy land. We managed to convince 3-4 of them and believe it or not, our first 1 lakh (Rs hundred thousand) came within the next few days. We paid the advance for the land and were in business!
We survived on subsistence salaries and worked out of a garage. Our phone connection was an extension of the landlord?s. We actively used our credit cards (that the card companies hopefully handed out at IIM) to survive! While Kamal worked on the design and the building itself, we were out in the market selling like crazy. We?d use the cash from customers to pay for the building; Our first building had 12 apartments and we sold all 12. We had never seen so much money. It was scary!"
But real-estate was clearly not something Ravi and Ronnie felt comfortable with. After one and a half years and many sleepless nights (after being threatened by toughs and wondering where the money to pay contractors and others would come from), they decided to quit the real-estate business and get into their first love, software.
Ravi and Ronnie then formed Right Fit Solutions with the objective of placing software engineers overseas and undertaking projects for Indian clients. Total Environment provided the initial capital for PCs and other basic infrastructure. "It was hard. We cold-called people and tapped into our networks for business. But we learnt the market very well. Our first project came courtesy our accountant - we then placed ads in papers for people to execute the project! Subsequently, we undertook projects for clients like Citibank, BPL Finance, and KPMG. Our experience was not very good. Companies in India don?t want to pay for software. We?re still owed money by some of them. However we placed a couple of engineers in UK and for the first time were cash-flow positive"
THE TURNING POINT
June 1998 was the turning point. Says Ravi "we were feeling low as Right Fit was not scaling and we were wondering where to go. I wanted to quit and spoke to Ronnie about it. He pep talked me into changing my mind. Only later did I come to know that Ronnie too was feeling low and had talked to Kamal about it! But we decided to give it one more shot. The internet was happening in a big way in the US and we?d realized that the internet was the way to go. We were aware of the Net and were avid users and browsers. If people like Sabeer Bhatia could do it, why not us?!" And then THE BIG IDEA struck us: we spent nights discussing the idea and decided to just do it. We did a lot of research and developed a business plan."
"We then went looking for money. Some of the VC firms we talked to baulked at funding an internet idea ? they wanted us to go to Silicon Valley. We were then put onto Sivan Securities through a friend. They were impressed by the idea but wanted to get the idea whetted by an expert before committing any money. And the expert turned out to be Sabeer Bhatia! He was coming to India in August (199
for the India Internet World show and we were to meet him in Delhi. We sat up nights and prepared a truly fantastic multimedia presentation ? I learnt Macromedia along the way.
We travelled 2nd class by train to Delhi. But gaining access to Sabeer there was next to impossible: he was a celebrity and the organizers were jealously guarding him and rationing his time. We waited outside his hotel room for about 5 hours hoping to get some time. Finally late in the evening, as the last visitor came out and before the organizers could stop us, we went in to meet Sabeer. We?d just started our presentation on a borrowed laptop (we paid Rs 3000 for it) when he said he was too tired to pay attention and do full justice to us; He suggested we meet in Bangalore in a couple of days and gave us a phone number to call.
But there was one problem: Sabeer would be reaching Bangalore much ahead of us. He was flying and we were taking the train! Thanks to our IIM-credit cards, we too flew back to Bangalore. But getting hold of Sabeer in Bangalore was even more difficult especially since the number he?d given us was an old one! Anyway, we managed to get hold of the new number and kept trying to reach him. The calls were being screened at his home but one day at about 8 in the morning we got through and were told by his mother that Sabeer had gone to his old school (St Joseph?s). We rushed out to St Jospeh?s on my scooter and finally met him there. We then fixed up a presentation the following day at Sivan Securities offices.
The presentation started with Sabeer not showing much interest. But somewhere along the way, he sat up and got interested. He gave us the thumbs up and we were in the money from Sivan. So here we were: 2 founders of Circle Systems, an idea, $1 million in the bank, and with a tight time line to meet. We moved to a "good" office and then worked the IIT alum network for getting people. Our chief architect Chidambaram "Chiddu" was with Infosys in Pune and we coaxed him to join us. After all, he was our junior from IIT and we?d ragged him there! We managed to get 8 people in place by October including 2 who we?d placed earlier through Right Fit! Development was on in full swing.
We were in touch with Sabeer all along and were keeping him updated on the developments at our end. In March 1999 he quit Microsoft and started his new venture. What we were working on seemed to fit into the bigger picture he had in mind; suddenly we had a choice: Team up with Sabeer Bhatia or go it alone. In April we traveled to the US and met with him. We decided to team up with him simply to maximize the chances of success given his track record."
Sabeer wanted to name his new company Arzoo ? meaning passion or desire- but was disappointed to learn that the name had already been taken. When he asked Ravi and Ronnie what name they?d like for the new company, they replied:Arzoo. They were the ones who had already registered the domain in January!
Arzoo is currently rolling out an E-Commerce B2C portal that promises to change the user shopping experience. The roll-out is expected later this year. We?ll have to wait till then to know what THE BIG IDEA was.
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