Meerut, about 70 km from Delhi, is a hub for education and medicine for western UP. That is where Nitin Gupta did his growing up. His father was a bank manager, who at heart was a scientist. Dad had used one of India’s first computers during his own post graduation days – when he had to travel from Meerut to the meteorological office in Delhi to use a punch card computer. Nitin’s Mother is a PhD and used to be professor of organic chemistry in a Meerut college. The family was quite tech savvy. Nitin remembers that even when they did not have a car or television, they had a PC!
Nitin was a good student in his school, usually in the top 10% tile but never the topper. There was no academic pressure from parents. A decent JEE rank got him into IIT Bombay. Though he had an interest in computers and electronics, his rank did not allow him the privilege of joining those branches. He had to choose between chemical, metallurgy and aeronautics . He chose aeronautics. Nitin decided to learn basic electronics and software himself. It helped that he had already written GW Basic programs by the time he was in school. He had grown up making DIY projects that used to get featured in India’s then popular Electronics For You magazine. This hobby continued at IIT.
Inspired by his mother, he wanted to get into academics, so that he could tinker around tech without worrying about paydays. Following the herd, Nitin also went to do his post graduation in the US. He was in the top 10% even in the aeronautics batch and that helped him get admitted to a fully funded PhD program at the University of Maryland. UMCP was working on a DARPA project for developing small drones. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. It is an agency that has shaped the modern world, with technologies like weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim credit.
Although Nitin’s interest was in aerial robotics, such a program did not exist at the University of Maryland. He was hired to do the control systems and electronics for the drone. His guide was from a material science background and therefore mentoring was quite limited. After 2 years at University, Nitin decided to come back to India with no path in mind. Let serendipity happen!
One of his IITB professors had left teaching and joined https://zeusnumerix.com/, a startup incubated at IIT Bombay. Nitin remembers that his salary at the startup was Rs 15,000 per month, which was 1/4th of what he had been offered on IIT campus placements, 2 years earlier. He joined Zeus because the work seemed to be interesting. Zeus did simulation engineering. They were looking at Nitin to deliver on control systems simulations. Nitin has always been a learning focussed person – and he has a philosophy of quitting when the learning stops. Our stone gathered moss at Zeus for a few months and then rolled on.
Nitin got an offer from Coral Digital Technologies, a Bangalore company that was actually into drone manufacturing for government agencies. He was promoted fast and was soon managing a team of 30 to 40 people. The company founder was a Navy veteran who believed very strongly in punctuality and discipline. This military culture did not bode too well for Nitin. (The company shut down a few years later.) And our rolling stone moved on.
The next jump was to Samsung. This was an opportunity in Korea where Samsung was looking at people who had experience with a software tool called Labview. This was a virtual simulation software. Samsung required Nitin to simulate flat panel displays that they were making. His team had to quantify and benchmark Samsung displays vis-a-vis the competitors. Nitin learnt a lot about color science and high speed cameras. Nitin found Samsung;s work culture a bit stressful. Though the working times were 8 to 4, there was a culture of staying back. If you stayed on till 9:00 p.m., you could double your salary with overtime payments. It was not about getting work done, as much as keeping the seat warm. Nitin’s learning stopped after 10 months – and it was time for our rolling stone to move on.
His Professor friend had, in the meantime, started Idea Research and Development, an aerospace consulting company. Nitin joined him as a co-founder. They worked on interesting stuff like missile guidance systems. However, most of Nitin’s time was spent chasing orders in government labs. He realised that this was a quintessential customised services business and so was going to be very difficult to scale up. This was 2009 and Nitin had just got married. Marriage is usually a time when financial conservativeness kicks in – but Nitin can be trusted to turn conventional thinking upside down. Idea R and D was shut down and Nitin convinced his wife that they would survive on her income and Nitin would take a sabbatical to do a virtual PhD in the area of autopilots and autonomous systems!
Most of Nitin’s education has been self driven. A year of researching academic articles gave him the confidence to actually start building autopilots. Nitin joined the DIY drone community and ended up making a cool autopilot board which weighed just 4 grams. Earlier versions would weigh upwards of 30 gm – and for a hobbyist that was way too high. A typical hobby drone weighs under a hundred grams. The DIY community was excited about this new board and a trickle of orders started flowing in. Nitin baptised his new startup as Flytbase and picked up the basics of eCommerce to be able to fulfil these orders.
Development has always been Nitin’s forte, but production, testing and QA was not his cup of tea. So circa 2012, Nitin took his first baby step from self employment to entrepreneurship, when he hired a college fresher to look after manufacturing. The board used SMD devices and our fresher had to be upskilled on soldering Surface Mount devices and the use of skillets and ovens for completing the PCB. People continued to get added to the Flytbase team in proportion to the revenue growth.
Nitin also hit upon a very interesting recruitment hack – the Research Assistant. At IITs. talented RAs join at ludicrously low salaries because they use their time at IIT to build up their resumes for US University applications. Nitin decided to imitate the academic system and hire Research Assistants with the promise that he would help them get into US universities. This worked out well for both parties and Flytbase alumni went on to fly to the US soon enough.
But by then the business environment had started changing. His company’s mainstay of aviation microcontrollers had started facing the heat from low priced Chinese competition. Not only were the products cheaper, but the Chinese were much more agile in new product development. Sitting in India, hardware was going to be a difficult area to be globally competitive in. Time for our rolling stone to move up the value chain. Nitin evaluated the option of shifting to Shenzhen and investing in manufacturing there. Thankfully that did not happen – but Flytbase pivoted to drone operating systems. The mission was to build an Operating System (OS) which developers could use for building drone control apps.
After 2 years of trying to develop an OS, Nitin realised that the population of drone app developers was not sufficient to justify this OS investment. So Flytbase decided to use the OS as a backbone and develop apps itself, negotiating with clients to ensure that the ownership of the intellectual property remained with Flytbase. About 8 to 10 interesting apps got built – parking lot management, bird chasing at airports, etc. The Flytbase team then zeroed in on what they thought was the million dollar opportunity – indoor drones for warehouses. They managed to find a lead customer in British Airways. The requirement was to navigate indoor shelves, scan barcodes and update the actual inventory status of the spares.
British Airways had already given a contract to an American company who had failed to deliver. BA surprised the Flytbase team by actually sending across a representative to the Pune office within a week of the inquiry being floated. The entire team slept for 3 days in the office and managed to execute a successful demo for the BA team. Flytbase got an order for the Proof of Concept – and got funded by BA for their research. Then went on to sign PoCs with a few more companies like GE, Schneider, Ikea and Mahindra Logistics. A year later, another rolling stone moment happened – when the Flytbase team realised that things were not working out the way they had imagined. Time for another pivot!
Flytbase had been working parallelly on automating the docking process for drones. With low weights and small batteries, drones have very limited flying time, so they need to dock often to charge up the batteries. If this docking process could be automated, then it was a major step in a lot of routine use cases like surveillance. This was a bet-the-company move. And after multiple pivots over the years, Nitin finally hit paydirt!
What has helped Flytbase’s multiple pivots is its college club culture. The passion is mandatory, the attendance voluntary and the motivation intrinsic. The average age in the company is 24 years. This was a Majboori ka naam Mahatma Gandhi story. In the initial days, the company did not have the funds to hire people with experience. But necessity became the mother of invention and they are now very happy staying away from ‘experience’ Nitin believes that in a kind of field that he is in, experience is unwanted baggage. People find it very difficult to unlearn. Drone software is a new industry where companies like Flytbase are writing the rules that the industry has come to operate on. Freshers tend to be good learners – and the only stipulation that Flytbase has for its learners – make new mistakes!
Today, India has draconian laws for drone imports. Local manufacturers do not make very reliable hardware. So prices are high and qualities low. As a result, India is not a market for Flytbase. Every country has now come up with a different drone policy, but that’s not a problem. Flytbase has customers in 50 countries and it’s unlikely that all of them will crack down on the same technology at the same time. Business development at Flytbase is done differently. Though Nitin is based out of San Jose, the sales team is based out of Pune and rarely travels. 100K deals are being closed by 24 year olds. Investors have found this model very interesting because it reduces the sales costs. And Nitin in his innocence says that in the company’s self-funded days this was the only way they could grow. Now it is part of Flytbase culture.
At Flytbase the policy is to not have policies! His investors are worried about what happens as the company grows. Can this kind of laissez faire scale up? Time will tell. I remember Google having a policy of not hiring MBAs which I thought was a great thing for a tech company. The tragedy was that as Google grew, the MBAs started marching in. I asked Nitin about ambitions in the hardware space. I believe it is better to be a total solution provider rather than a software vendor. But Nitin believes that software is eminently more scalable than hardware. Methinks, with increasing automation of coding, it is only a matter of time before the Chinese catch up. Time for our stone to start thinking about the next roll!