Startup - first steps

For many years and ever since I began planning to leave the Army prematurely, I have been thinking of working for myself. The first few months after retirement were tough. Adjusting to civvies street after committing to a life in the Army needs a lot more accomodation and re-skilling than I had begun to believe in the run up to taking the decision to put in my papers. It was 1994, the world wide web had just perked up enough interest to make people sit up and begin to take notice. It was 1996 by the time people like Bill Gates wrote his now famous "The Road Ahead" on the possibilities of converging technology domains and how the web would one day change the world.

It changed mine for sure. I was doing my Advanced Electrical and Mechanical Engineering course at CME, Pune when I finally took the plunge. The course was by itself was an eye opener, especially the field of software engineering. The PC had come a long way from the green screen days of the early 80s when I did my BTech. A visit to Pune University to get the syllabus for a post-graduate program in Computer Science ended with me landing up at the CDAC-ACTS. And that was it. I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I brought my first PC - an AT (for advanced technology that ran at 66MHz and had 40MB of hard disk space and 1 MB of RAM - who would ever need more!). The ACTS program was a blitzkrieg through the latest trends in technology and languages. C++ was the new C and Stroustrup was working on something called Templates. Graphics advanced to fly-through models and India had had a breakthrough in parallel computing with Param and Paras. Network programming appeared tricky as you had to switch between two computers to test your code. Socks made life a bit easier. And a new Silicon Valley company was gaining prominence in the new field of relational databases.

Six months went through in a whirl. I moved to a little known pensioners paradise called Bangalore to setup business. But dwindling cash reserves and the 11 month deposit to rent an apartment drove me back to home base in Delhi.

I needed to settle down in civvy street before I tried anything that involved my own cash. So it was back to being an employee in the Escorts group, then planning to implement something called an ERP. I remember telling the Escorts chief of IT that I knew databases, but had never worked with an ERP. He asked me what I did in databases, and I described a project that was about shop floor scheduling. That cinched the deal and I became an Avalon champion in the manufacturing team. It was a long two year haul, but that made all of us champions specialists in ERP by 1995. We were early movers and the future looked bright.

It was not long before that I landed a job in Singapore with a US consulting firm. My startup plans were firmly on the back burner as salaries climbed and went right through the roof. We moved to the US in 2000 landing in San Francisco on the 4th of July. It appeared to be a dream come true, but a downturn was just around the corner. And just when we thought that things could get no worse, came 9/11 and the layoffs. Economic recovery would be slow and painful and could well take upward of 4-5 years was one of the predictions. We wound up and headed home.

It was two years before I managed to return to the same level of earning with a contract in the UK with telecom major Orange. Fascinating time, but where was I headed? Back in India to another dreary operational role handling an offshore facility. It was the absolute pits, but luckily lasted only a couple of years.

Then on a chance visit to a Franchise Exhibition, just as I was headed out to the exit, something caught my attention. A few questions and I was signing an MoU.

Finally, we had a startup!