Interview

17
Feb 09

In their Own Words – Jojo Joson of Techseol Web Solutions

Continuing on with the “In their Own Words” series, here’s an interview with Jojo Joson of Techseol Web solutions.

Techseol provides e-business services to make it a success using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing. Jojo and his c0-founders started Techseol right after graduating from college.

Why did you do a startup?

A startup is always challenging & it gives freedom of operation. We can experiment our new creative thoughts in a startup, moreover our thoughts have a value. Despite the huge risks involved, a startup will give a high reputation, chance to explore new fields, a platform to learn many new concepts & ideas. What I value most is “experience on world” that I am having!

What inspired you?
Well, we formed Techseol not because of some inspiration. Techseol is the result of learning that we had 2 years ago. It was accidental that we got into the world of online money and the web industry. We were able to generate incomes from online advertising like Google adsense and from many other sources the very beginning of our entry into web world (i.e in 2005 to 2006). This initial experience gave us an understanding of the huge potential of this industry. This learning about potential of this industry lead us to formation of our company.

Who all are involved with Techseol?
There are 5 co-founders including me. We all are engineering graduates (2004-2008 batch) from St.Joseph’s college of Engineering, Kerala.

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Interview — 8 comments

5
Jan 09

In Their Own Words – Interview with The Four Fountains Spa founder Anurag Kedia

I’m starting a new series – “In Their Own Words“, in which, I intend to interview entrepreneurs and hope that it inspires others to seek out the entrepreneurial path and challenge the status quo. I’m gonna try my best to make it a regular feature on the blog.

I start this series with an interview with Anurag Kedia, co-founder of The Four Fountains Spa, a spa and wellness chain in India.

PS: Readers from Pune – there’s a special treat for you at the end of the interview.

Q: Who all are involved with The Four Fountains Spa?
A: There are three of us involved as promoters. Sunil Rao, Saurabh Garg and myself. All three of us are management graduates from the batch of 2004. Sunil is from SPJIMR while Saurabh and myself have studied at IIM Ahmedabad. Saurabh and Sunil both were earlier working with HUL and i was working with KPMG.

Q: How did you got into spas?
A: We all loved to get massages but always found it very expensive. We started studying this market and realised that the industry has a huge growth potential in the country if the consumers are offered value. The opportunity to create a new category and own it, is what excited us and we decided to get into this field.

Q: What are some of the interesting trends you observe in this industry?
A: We observe that more than 50% of our clientele is male, which is not a very common perception. Also, gifting of spa therapies has really taken off for us. And people who are now not in India but have friends and family in Pune, have been a big source of revenues for us. Spa therapies form a perfect gift option because it not only pampers a person but also improves the health & wellbeing of a person

Q: How did the venture start out ? Did you bootstrap the initial venture ?
A: We had quite our jobs and were doing market research for around 4-5 months. After this we started speaking to prospective VCs. We were fortunate to find a VC soon enough and hence, we were funded from Day 1 of operations.

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Interview — 9 comments

8
May 08

Dhingana launches games, awesome new UI – interview with founders

dhing.JPGDhingana has just launched a games section with games like Cricket, Holi Tamasha etc and have refreshed their landing page to a great new design.

As popularity of Dhingana soars, I thought this would be a good opportunity to interview the Dhingana founders on their entrepreneurial experience thus far. As per Compete, US traffic to the site is down ~5% from January 2008, but is up by about 700% over the last year.

dhinganacom_uv.png

Interview follows:

1) How old is Dhingana today ?
More then 1.5 years old.

2) Can you share any interesting insights into your audience – like which are the top 5 countries you are seeing the traffic from ?
Sure. Our user base is spread over the world in more then 185 countries. Top countries are India, US, UK, Canada, UAE, Australia, Pakistan, Singapore, Germany & Japan

3) Any interesting info related to how many monthly hits / pageviews ?
4) How many  MB/GB’s are you currently streaming a month ?
This is a very exciting time for us. We are experiencing phenomenal growth rate and we have grown by more then 880% in terms page views over the last year.

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India Startups / Interview — 9 comments

8
Jan 08

Interview with FlipKart founder Binny Bansal

The following is a guest post by V V K Chandra, who blogs at WebGeekBlog.

I have got a chance to interact with the founders of a new web startup company ‘FlipKart‘. FlipKart is an online book store primarily serving Indian consumers.

I am one of the very first consumers and I have ordered over a dozen books in the last two months from FlipKart. I am really impressed with the way they ship the books so fast and at no cost.

Following is the interview I have done over email with Binny Bansal who is one of the two co-founders.

When was flipkart.com founded?

Flipkart.com was founded on 5th Sept 2007. The website was launched on 15th Oct 2007.

Could you tell me about founders and their background?

Sachin Bansal (26) and myself, Binny Bansal (25), started flipkart.com. Both of us are computer science graduates from IIT-Delhi from the 2005 batch. Sachin worked at Techspan for 6 months and then at Amazon India for a year and a half. I worked at Sarnoff India for a year and a half and then at Amazon India for 8 months. We quit our jobs in September 2007 to begin our startup journey. And to clarify any doubts in advance, we are not related to each other.

How many days it took to launch the service?
It took us about a month and a half to start a basic working website with 50,000 titles. We’ve now grown our catalog to over 1 Lakh available titles.

Whats the total team size?

Primarily, there is only Sachin and myself. We also manage a small team which takes care of our back-end operations.

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Interview — 4 comments

27
Jun 07

Indicast interview with Avnish Bajaj of Matrix Partners

Indicast has a great podcast with Avnish Bajaj, Matrix Partners, previously co-founder of Baazee.  As an entrepreneur turned VC, Avnish offers some very insightful and most often, very frank perspectives.

Listen to the podcast for a great background on how he came about to founding Baazee. He even shares his experience of getting acquired etc…

Thanks Avnish and the Indicast team for coming up with this podcast.



India Funding / Interview — No comments

14
Jun 07

LiveMint interview with Raghav Bahl, MD TV18 India Ltd

Livemint has an in depth interview with Raghav Bahl, MD, TV18 India Ltd. As part of the interview, Raghav discusses how their partnership with CNN, CNBC & Viacom. He also discusses the future plans for the company and that their current focus will be on launching the general entertainment channel.

“Today, we are India’s largest news broadcast group… We want to be a very large media and entertainment group with a significant presence across the television broadcast business, Internet and films, and filmed content space,” he says.

You seem quite aggressive in the Internet space. How do you see the business panning out?

We wish to be a big player in the consumer Internet space. It may be a small business as of now, but it will take off sooner than later. We
believe that media companies in the West have, in a way, missed this opportunity. They couldn’t foresee the growth of the Internet in the
manner it has happened. We are also very clear that we don’t want to be just a content player because that’s a given. We want to have a
significant play in the Internet consumer services business. Last year, our Internet operations contributed around Rs25 crore to the top-line and we see it doubling again this year. Continue reading →



Interview — No comments

11
Jun 07

When it comes to tech outsourcing, India is five years ahead of any competitor

FE has an interesting interview with John Gantz, IDC Chief Research Officer. As part of the interview, he talks about IDC’s 2008 predictions for the global IT industry and the impact on India.

Speaking of Indian software companies, he says that there will at least be one Indian IT company amongst the global top 10 by 2010. India companies have built great brand equity and are about five years ahead of their competitors. He also mentions that Indian domestic market is also poised for tremendous growth with India currently making up only 1% of the worlds IT spend.

Finally, he mentions how CTO’s and CIO’s should warm up and embrace Web 2.0 concepts and technologies such as wikis, UGC videos etc.

via FE.



Interview — No comments

7
May 07

Sridhar Vembu, AdventNet (Zoho) CEO, interview – Part 2

Earlier last week, Hindu had the first part of an interview with Sridhar Vembu, AdventNet CEO – the company behind the Zoho suite of services.

Read the second installment of this interview here.



Interview / Technology — 1 comment

1
May 07

Avnish Bajaj interview, part II

In the first part of his interview with Hindu, Avnish Bajaj mentioned how Web2.0 is not currently a viable idea in the Indian market. In the second part of this interview, he talks about being a VC – what factors guide their investment decisions, what role they play in terms of investing in a company and what it takes to be hired to work for a VC firm.
According to him, it is easier to work with an ‘A’ team but, like many in the field, he frets that finding such a team is tougher in India. “I believe there are a lot of ‘A’ opportunities to explore in India.

Talking about entrepreneurial traits, he mentions:

He believes that there are two kinds of people with this trait: the first always keep getting bored and never achieve anything in the long run. “The second kind are the entrepreneurial types who keep getting bored until they find their passion and vocation, which is more meaningful and different.

On what he looks for in the venture:

And that’s a trait he actively looks for, now that he’s a VC himself. He also looks for track record of achievement – “because success is no accident” – passion about business, understanding of the market opportunity, dose of reality, etc.

Rest of the interview here



Interview — No comments

30
Apr 07

Sridhar Vembu, AdventNet CEO, on Zoho services

Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet – the company behind the Zoho suite of services, has an interview with Hindu. A snippet from the interview:
Vembu is a man who firmly believes that India has what it takes to build world-beating products, despite being most famous for concentrating on services.

“All remaining barriers are mostly in our mind. The reason most Indian companies concentrate on services is because of a certain aversion to risk, to trying out new things – an attitude of excessive caution.”

That caution is understandable in anyone who grew up in pre-liberalisation India, he adds. “The good news is that a new generation is coming,” without any such assumptions.

Remaining interview here.



India Startups / Interview — 2 comments

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