This time’s thoughts are provoked by one of my school classmate’s brother – Gireendra Kasmalkar. Giri runs a 1500 strong company called SQS – which is into one of the most non-glamourous areas in IT – software testing.
Giri did his mech engg from IIT Bombay. Went to the US for his MS, but surprised his family by coming back in 1989, immediately after his MS. Joined the CAD group at TCS, when the headcount was still in its hundreds. Wanted to be an entrepreneur before marriage, so he left after 2 years when an opportunity arose to do a project in AutoLisp, the programming language for the then popular AutoCAD. What worked for him is lack of B School education. As he says, if he had to make a business plan, he would have never been an entrepreneur. Even today he feels that if you want to develop entrepreneurs, then all you need to show people is good (big) problems.
The AutoCAD company morphed into Prabodhan, a company that was started by him and 3 of his schoolmates at Dnyana Prabodhini. The other partners were into different businesses, and the feeling was that they would work together so that they could share ideas and common services like HR. The experiment did not work out – and eventually the three separated.
By that time in 2004, Giri’s company had grown to about 100 people and another opportunity presented itself, in the way of a company that was looking at getting some of its software tested. Giri started work, saw the size of the opportunity, and decided to concentrate exclusively on it by exiting the AutoCAD business. Brave decision, considering that AutoCAD had made them official business partners by then.
Getting in early was a blessing. The company – Verisoft – developed its own standards, sometimes having to refer IEEE papers for its test cases formulation. Unlike other dot com boom companies, Giri’s Indian clients saved him. Giri managed to attract talent to his start-up by a very simple proposition. In any mainstream IT company, the testers are always second class citizens, like maintenance in a typical manufacturing scenario. So there is only so much distance you can cover vertically. At Verisoft, the journey ends at the top for a tester. He uses a very interesting analogy to drive home the importance of testing. He says testers are like goal keepers and developers are like strikers. A striker needs to only convert one out of 10 chances to become a hero. For the goal keeper, he needs to only be clumsy in only one chance out of ten to be a villain.
Giri has a very interesting philosophy of starting new, even when the old stuff is doing perfectly alright. He uses the Apple example very well. Every company has to have a Steve Jobs and a Tim Cook. The Jobs innovates, the Cook operates. Giri considers himself the Jobs in his company, so he started looking for the next big thing in testing. He decided to go for Gaming. He went to attend a conference in LA of game developers, where only 5 out of 250 attendees were Indians – very surprising considering California’s density of desis. The logic was justified – this was a niche that Infy would not be getting into for a long time to come. The next thing that Giri cracked was partnerships with Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft – the leaders in the console industry. The moment that was done, projects started to flow in. Today his company employs more than 200+ people in this vertical alone, which has gone on to include doing regulatory tests for the online gambling industry.
In keeping with his always move when the times are good, he started looking for investors, more the strategic than the financial types. He found his partner in SQS, a Germany based world leader in the space of testing. SQS already had a presence in Egypt and South Africa (both of which are in the same time zone as Germany.) India was their missing piece. Also for Giri, who had no presence in Europe, SQS’ lack of American customers was another natural synergy. Another thing complementary was the end users – SQS is strong in banking and retail, customers Giri lacked. SQS though drove a hard bargain, taking over the majority share holding in Verisoft, which was rebaptized as SQS India and its US arm was renamed SQS Inc. Unlike most acquisitions, this one worked – and one of the reasons is that 5 years down the line Giri still runs the company – and is on the global board of directors of SQS worldwide. What matters, says Giri, is the growth that the company can offer to its employees.
Things were not always hunky dory at SQS India. SQS adopts a wait and watch policy with its acquisitions. For the first 2 years SQS did not offshore any work to its Indian arm. One possible reason could be that its salesforce, so used to pitching for its European arm in competition with the desi companies, would have found to communicate to its customers, that they too had joined the bandwagon. But there was support. An expat was posted by SQS to India for coordination, but he reported to Giri, instead of vice-versa. From the third year project flow started happening from SQS, and the expat manager returned back after 3 years.
Giri’s managerial style has been honed by mentors – his MBA substitutes. He is a project manager in the true sense of the word, identifying opportunities, setting time frames, handing over operations – and moving on. He has exactly 2 people who report in to him – and a typical project takes 6 months to execute before handing over. What helps, says Giri, that he is not enamored by technology. Amongst his projects are a cloud based testing service and output based pricing. The output based pricing works in a context of a test factory, where customer pays by results, and not efforts. This, Giri believes, is going to be the future of IT worldwide.
A recent project has been the take over of Kingsoft, a Chennai based company, with a 800 headcount. This has doubled SQS India’s headcount. Giri is a regular at seminars and conferences – will testify to that since I met him first at one such conference, and asked him about the well being of his brother, Mahendra, who was my classmate at St Vincent’s. He makes it a point to ask questions – and be noticed. He calls this strategy as zero cost branding – since he believes the CEO has to be the brand ambassador of the company, and so it is important to be visible. Otherwise Giri remains a very low key person, who takes the company bus to work – as he believes it forces him to be back home on time!