Madhukar is the son of a national level hockey player. In contrast to the father Madhukar’s life turned out to be more brain than brawn. He did his Hindi medium schooling in various places in UP, where his dad was posted in the SRPF. When Madhukar was in his class 10, his dad got posted in BHU in Varanasi – and came back quite impressed. He recommended to his son, that he should join a place like BHU – and the son did, going one step further to get a JEE rank of 106, and ending up in the first batch of CS at IIT Bombay. His bad English had 2 effects at IITB: One his seniors did not enjoy ragging a guy who could not understand their Angrezi taunts, Two when the time came to fly the shores to the US, he was the only one in the batch who stayed back. In his own words: ‘GRE de diya. TOEFL de diya. Phir apne aap se puchcha, ye kyon kar rahaan hoon?’.
The placement scene for the first CS batch was quite dismal – hence he followed the dictum: if you can’t earn, continue to learn – and took admission to the M.Tech program at IITB.
As his program was getting over, he chanced to attend a lecture by Dr. Shankar, formerly HoD of the CS department at IIT Kanpur, who was starting a company in Pune. Madhukar met Dr Shankar after the talk, to ask him about whether his decision to quit CS and go in for a Ph.D in Environmental engineering was a good one. Dr Shankar offered him a job in his startup – and very soon made him a partner too. The startup was called Advanced Graphics Systems (AGS), and it made a designing product, very much like AutoCAD. The AGS team had the best brains in the country and Dr Shankar’s contacts in the government was able to get them contracts from the Defence, but they were not able to make any great inroads in the private sector. They got offers from all the biggies to take them over, but hubris prevented them from taking them up. The last straw was when Computer Vision (which later on became Parametric) set up base in Pune, and managed to poach a lot of their team members. AGS, which had given Madhukar so much of happiness (probably because this was also the place where he met his future wife), a definitive ‘not to do’ list and so little money, was finally shut down 8 years after starting up.
Madhukar followed in the footsteps of a lot of his colleagues and joined Parametric (PTC), where he did well because he was amongst the few people who actually had experience in building a CAD software from scratch. He honed his skills in User Interfaces. He realized the problem of featuritis that had been plaguing AGS. (Featuritis is also called feature creep. Wikipedia definition: the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software. Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design.) And most importantly, he started picking up the basics of salesmanship.
His performance at PTC got him visibility – and later on an offer from Shirish Deodhar, whose own entrepreneurial company, Frontier Software, had been taken over by Veritas (which itself later on got taken over by Symantec). Veritas had taken over two small companies in the US which were involved in Backups and Madhukar was assigned the task of traveling to the US to convince them that their development work could be offshored to Pune. The change in domain from software to storage was a challenge – but for the intellectually inclined CS engineer, it was still algorithms. The challenge was moving away from Unix to Windows. Madhukar, the IIT engineer, even joined a course at the local SEED Infotech to bring himself upto speed on Windows. He managed the move to storage – and did that well.
3 years into Veritas he realized that he had done so well – as to almost make himself redundant. Cushy job, good pay, great stock options (the Veritas share price seemed to go north a few cents everyday), nothing else he could ask for in life. But he was missing one thing that he got at AGS – happiness. So one day he surprised his dad – who was then visiting with him – by announcing to him that he was quitting to start off on his own. Dads being dads, asked him the obvious question.
Dad: Why?
M: Even my colleague Director was quitting to be with me.
Dad: So what?
M: Even the CEO is quitting to be with me.
Dad: All the more reason for you to stay back. This is your chance to be CEO.
Madhukar followed his heart, and started the very offbeat sounding In Reality. (No Tech, No Soft, No Vaporware). The team believed that an honest name will make customers understand that these are guys who will deliver. Another learning that was applied from past experiences was to have an exit criteria – don’t fall in love with your company – you may end up missing your next baby as a result. Another learning was Focus – they were clear that they would only focus on services – no products. Apart from Shirish, he was joined by colleague Director at Veritas – Hemant Joshi. The second entrepreneurial journey was a wee bit easier – thanks to the contacts that they had between the three of them. The first order took some time in coming though. It was three months before they got green signaled from the Vancouver based Crytal Reports, who ended up giving 40% of their development work, to what was then still a 3 person company. (2 person actually, because Shirish was yet to be relieved from the CEO role at Veritas). Things ramped up pretty well after that and within a span of 16 months the team size was up to 150 – things were going so fast, that the company was being stretched for working capital. And Madhukar had learnt his lessons from the AGS days, when you get a good offer, waiting for a better one is not always the best thing to do. They got an offer from Symphony Services, and sold out, staying back 3 years to ensure that the handover happened very very smoothly.
The next stop on the serial entreprenership journey was again interestingly named – N Factorial. This was with the same partners. When asked what made the partnership stick – Madhukar mentioned: Trust, No sense of competition and complementary abilities. N Factorial was a mentoring company – where the team worked with 8 startups. The team did not pick up a stake in any of these companies, believing that it would hamper the quality of advice that they gave their mentees. Mentees would meet the mentoring team once a week. Some of the mentees were a pleasure to work with – ready to accept advice, honest with information and constraints. Most were not. So N Factorial slipped into the horizon…
Which brings us to the current entrepreneurial setup – Sapience. And this time a products only company. Sapience started as an idea in the mind of Swati, Shirish’s spouse, who was toying around with something which could help improve the productivity of IT people. What Sapience does primarily is that it improves the productivity of the workforce. This is done at the first level by making them aware of how their work habits – and how their time is being used. Denying the tag of Big Brother that some in the audience tried putting on – Madhukar mentioned that it is up to the user whether she wants to share her personal data. The carrot for sharing the data is that once she does it – she can benchmark her own work with cohorts in the company.
Learning even more from past experience, Sapience has been funded well from day 1. The team visited the first angel investors with a simple pitch – we don’t want your money, we want your contacts. After that it has always been the investors who have been visiting. As Madhukar puts it – when you are well funded, you are more inclined to hire better paid (read better talented) people. And when you can do that, your business is bound to do better. Sapience has deliberately adopted a slow growth in customer. First local, then global. They have started with friendly Pune clients, given them half baked products, and worked with them to resolve glitches and do the full bake. They expanded then to pan-India and have just started work with international clients. Even before international clients came in, the sales team is in place in the US. The product is quite interesting, the market universal. They already have 100,000 + users. Am awaiting the appearance of their free-for-individual use demo which is expected to appearing on their site soon. So watch out the space at www.sapience.net!
Post Script: One of Madhukar’s interesting hobby is telescope manufacturing. He has just finished making his own 11 inch telescope. He spent two years grinding the lenses to a nanometer accurate parabolic surfaces…