Bombay lad. Got his first internship to computers in his uncle’s company – Applied Electromagnetics, a Delhi based company, which worked on rugged computers. Btw, the uncle’s partner was the current CM of Maharashtra, Prithwiraj Ghorpade, his uncle’s classmate at Berkeley. Liked computers –  went on to IIT Bombay 85-89 EE batch. Was the first batch that did not use punch cards. Went on to Columbia. At Columbia he got RA which made him work on the networking of the university’s 4 campuses inside New York City. Prof under whom he did the RA was approached by NSFNet (National Science Foundation Net) – who were settting up the internet backbone for the US. Spent 6 years and then wife, who was colleague of his at Columbia, felt that they need to go back to motherland.

Returned back in 1996 based on a proposal to partner on an ISP. At that time VSNL and ernet were the only ISPs. Proposal fizzled out. Started Consulting. VSNL and Reliance were first customers. In fact VSNL first few months of consulting were done free of cost. They liked what they saw and started paying him. Whilst consulting realised that Indian bosses are much worse than American ones, so decided never to seek employment. First venture was in 1997 with Rajesh Jain of indiaworld.com fame – he formed co called Netcore. Had some differences with Rajesh and left. Wrote a business plan for netmagic and flew down to Delhi to discuss it with the visiting Directors of Exodus, company co-founded by Kanwal Rekhi, BV Jagadeesh and KB Chandrashekhar . Jagadeesh and co made the investment, just before the dot com bust – and with his first 20 cr started a data center in Mumbai in 1998. Met his 3 other co-founders in his consulting experience, two on networking, one on systems and one on utilities side. They could not compete with the likes of VSNL on bandwidth, but they made up on nimbleness, uptime by having better backups systems and infrastructure. (Interesting anecdote, when rediff started, it had to ship its own ACs etc to VSNL for its servers. Breakdowns used to happen because pigeons used to roost in the server room.)

Could not expand much as the capital markets dried post the dot com crash. With conservative financial policies (Advance cash payment, no credit) and offering of value added services managed to survive till 2005. Was almost down to last 25 lakh when second round happened. Did a re-think on business. Investors wanted growth, COO Dhanesh wanted financial security. With pressure from board, got his COO to leave – and growth started happening. 2006 Bangalore Data center happened, etc. Moral of the story – balance required. Also no ship can have 2 captains.

Second last funding was in 2010 from Nokia and Cisco. Last stage of funding has been from NTT. Moving in to new league – as deal size is approaching million dollars, up from Rs. 50 lakh, which was average customer size before NTT take-over.

2 main classes of customers: Enterprises and Internet companies. Both split equally as far as revenues are concerned. Amongst internet companies, clients are rediff, indiainfoline, bazee, makemytrip, flipkart, et al. Flipkart is the biggest customer on the internet side today. (Naukri and Shaadi are still hosted in the US) Sharad feels quite bullish about flipkart, feels that they will be a survivor. Compared to likes of Amazon cloud service, Netmagic focusses on mission critical applications. They do a much better job at handholding and SLA compared to Amazon. Downtime is also very less. 

Pain areas have been customers delaying payments and government inspectors. Has managed to delegate these to specific teams, so is leading a happy life now. Has been very happy with B2B business – and is pretty sure that he is a misfit for B2C, so netmagic will not venture into those areas. Also there is an issue of not trying to conflict with customers. For example they work with ‘platform as a service; with customers like Orangescape and Shepherd..