Arun’s dad worked with BHEL in Bhopal, and then Hardwar. He went on to do his mechanical engineering from GB Pant university in UP, followed by an MS from Virginia Tech. The conventional US dream job followed when he went to work in Chicago. He returned to India for his marriage, and thought that he should try a stint here. First became an investor in the stock markets – his brother in law was into share trading in Ahmedabad. After losing most of his investment realized that this is the wrong profession for him. Started looking for a job – found one in Pune in an IT startup – Ruksun. Pune also had the advantage of being his wife’s home town.
Arun did not have an IT background, so he started with what is usually the most menial job in any industry – quality. Ruksun was an internet focussed 6 person company when he joined. In 6 months time it had ballooned to 60. The Sindhi blood in Arun realized the opportunity and he decided to experiment with entrepreneurship. The idea was to develop a browser which was easy to use. In the mid nineties, the king of browsers was Nescape. Arun thought that he would make a browser which was even more user friendly than Netscape. A family friend in Connecticut offered to take care of the running costs of the company if Arun invested in the infrastructure.
A team of 4 people was hired to start Cyber Age in a rented house in Salunkhe Vihar in Pune. They sweated for 6 months in getting the browser in place. By the time they were finished with the coding, Microsoft’s free Internet Explorer got launched. This shook up Arun – as this turned out to not only dissuade his friend from investing, but also all the VCs that he had tried meeting up earlier. Learning from this, Arun developed a very interesting philosophy, which he explained using a coffee analogy. Good coffee’s taste gets ruined when you add sugar and cream. Bad coffee on the other hand is not worth the sugar and cream. A good company does not require funding, a bad one does not deserve it!
With no cash flows happening on the capital front, Arun decided to get going on the revenue front. On a shoe string budget he started frequenting companies in the Bay area, show casing Cyber Age’s browser as proof of his developmental ability. After long months spent chasing elusive customers, he found one who was ready to listen to his pitch. The customer seemed interested, but he insisted that Arun visit Kansas to meet their IT development team there. The shoe string budget was already exhausted, and Arun almost wrote off this customer also, when to his surprise, the customer sent him the air tickets to go to Kansa and arranged for his stay there. The assignment was given to Cyber Age, and this was the nucleus around which more assignments followed. Cyber Age moved on to Kalyani Nagar, a more hep suburb of Pune, and in a couple of years grew to a hotch-potch of 13 offices over there.
The company’s website domain was not available – the domain owner was approached – and he asked for a princely sum of 100 K US $ for handing it over to Arun, who thought at that juncture, that it was better to change the name – to Cybage. Cybage Software today is a 4500 strong company. Arun has not forgotten his quality roots in Ruksun, and has developed strong internal processes for quality. A 200 strong team works internally to quantify parameters that affect quality in Cybage. As Arun likes to put it – this dehumanizes decision making. But this dehumanization is appreciated, as it is construed to be a fair system, by the humans who work inside of it.
One of the decisions based on data analysis internally is that the employees who are most productive at Cybage tend to be single, male and out of Pune. (Cyber Age’s first four employees had fitted that mould.) What makes Cybage different is this math approach to most problems – it ensures that customers also benefit. Arun is a staunch believer that the companies that survive are those who continue to offer Value For Money to their customers. He is also a strong dis-believer in the ability of Indian IT companies to develop products.
Cybage’s culture is very efficiency-centric, but somehow my feeling is that this can cause them to at times lose out on effectiveness. Whenever we adopt a system it is also important to know its shortcomings. What cybage is doing is evolutionary – and was a bit saddened to hear Arun make a statement that it will take us 40 years to catch up with TCS if we double our growth rates.. There are two problems with this thought – one – why take only TCS as a benchmark? Why not Oracle? The other – is what is it that you can do which is Revolutionary? If it sounds very product-ish so be it. Can Cybage be the best recycler of code? Does that fit in with Cybage’s efficiency paradigm?
Would recommend Arun’s blog to you, which I found quite interesting – www.arunnathaniblog.com