Shridhar’s dad used to work with the Posts and Telegraphs department. Dad was a family educationist of sorts. Shridhar’s grandfather was not well educated. His dad was the eldest of 10 kids. He took responsibility for getting all of them educated. And then there were dad’s own three kids: Shridhar and his two elder sisters.
Shridhar was born in Nagpur – and his initial years were spent there. Dad’s job took them to Nashik. After a few years in Nasik, Shridhar, then in grade 7, was carted off to Mumbai. Dad made sure he got Shridhar into the best school in the city – Bal Mohan, Dadar. In hindsight, dad’s decision about the school helped find the right peers. More about that later.
Shirdhar went on to do his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay. Those days it was a 5 year course. He graduated in 1983 and then went for his MS in VLSI to Virginia Tech. Getting a PhD was not part of the academic plan after the MS, but Shridhar got influenced by a friend who was just starting a PhD around the same time as Shridhar was finishing his MS. So a PhD in artificial vision from North Carolina State University followed in 1989. In 1988, during the last year of PhD, our friend got married. The joint decision with Gauri, his better half, was that they would move back to India soon. More about that later. Before the move to India, Shridhar took the plunge in academics, so as to change his subject area. He became faculty at a Naval school in Monterey, California. Academics gave him freedom to do what he wanted. Another plus point in US academic life was that you are responsible for half your salary, unless you want to teach all the time.
In 1994, he came to India for a scouting trip. Decided not to go back to academics. Applied to CDAC, TRDC. One of his friends, Poorvi, introduced him to Anand Deshpande. Anand has an interesting way of assessing people. He invites them for guest lectures. Shridhar got invited to give a talk to 10 of Anand’s friends. The relationship started as a collaboration between a company Shridhar had floated in the US and Persistent. Shridhar had outsourced some development work to Persistent. In 1995, Anand invited Shridhar to join the board of Persistent. Shridhar closed down his US company and shifted base to Pune to focus on Persistent as their new COO.
In those days, product development was against the grain of the services dominated Indian IT sector. Yet, Anand and Shridhar grew the business from 20 to 500 engineers in the 8 years that Shridhar spent with Persistent. Shridhar managed to also see Persistent through the dot com bust of 2000. There were H1B visa issues. Attrition rates were high because a stint at Persistent, in the product development space, had good resume value.
At Persistent, Shridhar ran a skunkworks program, which worked on independent products. Persistent used these product development skills for getting orders from product companies that they had not worked with before. In 2003, Persistent’s revenue crossed $ 10 million for the first time. The Persistent team moved to its swanky new office at Bhagirath on SB Road. During this phase, Shridhar proposed to Anand Deshpande that it was time Persistent built its own products. Anand, who likes to take a longer term view, thought that this could lead to a conflict of interest with its customer base. Shridhar’s mind agreed with Anand’s decision, but his heart didn’t. So at the relatively young age of 42, Shridhar decided to step out of a secure and comfortable role at Persistent.
Around that time, Shridhar bumped into Sunil Gaitonde, IIT KGP alumnus of 1983, and like Shridhar, a Ph.D in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University. He and Shridhar had been together at Bal Mohan school, Mumbai. Sunil had spent most of his time in the product space. He had just sold his startup, Sarvega, to Intel and was ready to start his next gig. Sunil wanted to continue to be in the US and Shridhar wanted to continue in India. This arrangement worked out very well for the new venture – Gaitonde Shukla Labs, or GS Labs, as we know it now. They got into a non-compete agreement with Persistent. GS decided not to go in for venture capital funding at the early stage. They used the Persistent services-fo- product-development model to get revenues in. GS labs went on to provide services in infrastructure software, networking, identity management and TCP IP driven communication. But in their minds, Shridhar and Sunil were clear: their product company would be a different entity. Funds from GS’s client business were used for the deficit financing of K Point, the product company. In 2011, to get renewed focus, K Point was spun off as a separate company. K point does interactive video for business. They have got a full stack like YouTube for handling videos. The key difference is that when you are in video entertainment mode, you want the viewer to consume more and more. For business videos, the consumption should be less and less. Typical use case for K Point is demand generation.
Shridhar’s philosophy has always been one man one job. The product team was kept totally out of client work at GS. But at the top level double-timing was happening. In October 2020, operations at GS labs was handed over to their colleague, Atul Narkhede. Sunil and Shridhar moved out of GS labs to become full timers at K Point. At GS labs, given the scaling required, existing stakeholders saw a significant change in lifestyle, something they would not enjoy too much. So Atul and company, who ran GS labs, took a call to sell the promoter stake to Kedaara Capital, a private equity firm.
Shridhar has now shifted his energy to non-profits. He believes that education should be necessarily non-profit. To that end he is working on empowering school teachers. He has helped set up a Trust Lab at IIT Bombay. Apart from professors, he has got private sector companies to come together to work in the area of data security. Not only has he donated money for this lab, he is also donating his time for this effort. He also spends his time and money mentoring entrepreneurs who work in areas that he is interested in. Myelin, a company that helped develop the test engine for Bulls Eye, is one of Shridhar’s mentee companies now.
Shridhar is good at remembering names. And great at time management. His calendar is set out critically for client meets, the rest he can be a bit flexible on. His core principle in planning: make time for things other than work, through this you can meet people you would not otherwise meet. At IITB Alumni Association, Shridhar ran a non-tech program called Innovations. Entrepreneurs were given 6 minutes on the podium to pitch their products. The program ran for 5 years. The same format was later on copied by Shark Tank.
We had a short Q and A session.
What are the circumstances under which a promoter should not exit?
Most of his companies have done better after he has left. So in a way, it has been good. But every exit is unique. My footnote: exits are inevitable.
When should you raise money?Raise money when you sense a product-market fit.
What kind of products should a start-up focus on?
Build something that complements a bigger IP. Easier to open doors that way.
When to kill a product?
In Product management, take time to test and push sales. The ultimate test is to get customers to pay for what you build. If that’s not working, kill it.
What should one look for in a co-founder?
An attitude of – What’s right not whether I am right or you are right.Commitment to collaborate.Spirit of not taking credit.Alignment of purpose.Diversity in thinkingEthics.Trust.
Transparency. Sunil and Shridhar stopped staying at each other’s places. Decisions should be made in boardrooms, not drawing rooms.
Shridhar’s daughter is doing her PhD from Univ of Columbia on the sociology of Western Maharashtra. His son is a cognitive psychologist. Gauri, the better half has always been a homemaker. Shridhar is a great raconteur. In his Saturday morning breakfast meetings at Persistent, Shridhar would narrates stories about people who he had met through the week. He regaled us with a story about the role that he feels his better half, Gauri, has played in his life. Shridhar credits the story to Anand Deshpande. Disclaimer: Content can be seen to be sexist.
A village farmer had twin sons. When they got to a marriageable age, the farmer decided that he would get them married off to twin sisters. The farmer managed to find these sisters in a village not very far away from where they lived. They got married in a joint ceremony, for which the entire village got invited.
The sons went on to take jobs in different parts of the world and didn’t end up meeting each other for the next 20 years. Two decades on, with parents growing older, the family members decided to have a family reunion at the village. The twins were shocked when they met each other. The younger twin still looked like he had gotten married only yesterday. The elder twin was already looking like a grandfather. What had happened?
To solve the mystery they traced their lives backwards. Though they had stayed in separate cities, everything that happened over the last 20 years seemed to be almost the same in their lives. Still scratching their heads, they decided to trace the steps, starting from the beginning. They started with the Suhag raat. The younger twin’s wife had got him a glass of milk. The lights had been switched off – and just when the bed business was about to start, there was a noise from the window. Disturbed by this sudden noise, the younger twin took the glass of milk and threw it at the window. A cat had gotten in from the window and she got hit by the glass. The Injured cat was quickly escorted out of the room. ‘Ahh!’, said the elder twin. ‘We did not have any cat disturbing us during our suhag raat.’
That night at the village, as the elder twin was going to bed with his wife, a cat crept into the couple’s room. Now the elder twin knew exactly what he had to do. He threw his glass of milk at the cat. In spite of all the years of non-athleticism, his aim was good and the glass hit the cat. No sooner than he hit bulls eye, his wife screamed at him: ‘Are you crazy spilling precious milk on a good-for -nothing cat?’ She went on to thrash our friend with a jhaadu. Manjharla pahlyach divshi maraychi aste.