Things Ravi Pratap Is Up To

It’s been about 3 months since Vidya and I landed in Bangalore’s shiny new airport. I remember being welcomed by Bangalore’s cool air, and feeling a great sense of optimism about the life that lay ahead of me. That Thursday morning, the 14th of May, was the start of a new life in a city that was unfamiliar and strange in a way, yet warm, forthcoming and very familiar other ways. I suppose it was not very different from how I felt when I landed in St. Louis on the 20th of January, 2002. In an unfamiliar country all set to start a new life, I was beside myself with excitement at the novelty of the life I was about to experience. Seven and a half years later, in Bangalore, I’m getting started again.

I think it can safely be said that in the months I’ve lived here, I am now as much a feature of 6th Main, Indiranagar 2nd Stage, as the local chai shop, the security guards blowing their noisy whistles as cars whiz in and out of basement car parks, and the stray dogs that congregate in front of our apartment building every night and howl like their ancestors I live at one end of 6th Main and work at the other end. One end of it is secluded, with apartment buildings that house the urban rich and as prosaic in their design as they usually are in most urban parts of India. At the other end of 6th Main is a busy, noisy street, what they call Indiranagar Double Road and at that intersection lives my cofounder and partner in crime, Sharat. Every morning, I make my way from one end of 6th Main to the other, without being run over by honking cars, passing a cow or two on the way, sometimes a vegetable or fruit cart, before showing up at our office, which we currently run out of Sharat’s apartment.

As bootstrapping entrepreneurs, Sharat and I work out of a one-room office which serves as everything that you’d imagine we need - conference room, cubicle room, server room, war room, you name it. Out of this office we work to build our company one day at a time.

Sometimes I think about how far we’ve come from that day in October when I first had the conversation with Sharat about working together on a little idea that just may be something we could make a company out of. With me in DC and Sharat in Bangalore, and with Skype to help us out, we started putting together what we called an investor “teaser” presentation.

It took us nearly 6 weeks before we had a first working draft of our 6-slide deck. Another 10 weeks of vigorous brainstorming and revisions based on feedback resulted in a version that we had a lot more confidence in. By Jan 2009, we decided that we were getting closer to what seemed like a real idea with a defensible value proposition. It was time to start reaching out to investors and raise money for our venture. By February 2009, all Sharat and I were doing in our time outside of our day jobs was connecting with potential angel investors to drum up support for our idea. While we did the bit on pitching to investors with our slide deck, we also reckoned that it was important to put together a working prototype that would demonstrate our idea more directly. It was also real proof of our commitment, since we were pouring our time and money into making this real, not just peddling a slide deck to gauge interest in the investment community. Through the months of March, April, and May, we continued to seek money in what (we were told) was possibly the worst economic climate since the tech bubble burst in 2000, and in spite of being told by numerous people that raising money for a start-up at such a time didn’t sound like it would go anywhere.

It helps that Sharat and I both share a healthy disregard for the impossible. We kept ploughing ahead, pitching to investors, refining our business plan continuously, and always listening to the feedback we got but making our own judgements. Today we have a real company, an (albeit small) office, a solid business plan, and funding committed from angel investors who believe in our vision.

Clearly, this is only the tip of the iceberg and a lot remains to be done. But at least we’ve made it this far from being merely a thought that started in my head as I drove home each evening on the 495 Capital Beltway in DC.

You know what they say about succeeding in golf? It’s the direction that matters, not how far you hit the ball.

I think starting up is a little bit like that.

In the 28 years of my existence on this planet, there have been moments that have been imprinted in my mind so vividly that I visualize them as Technicolor films in slow motion that when replayed bring back a gush of emotions from those defining moments of my life. I may not be able to yet look back at this from the future but something tells me today is one such moment.

Today is my last day as an employee of Hillcrest Labs, Inc., where I’ve spent nearly the last 4 years working on exciting products at a young and dynamic start-up company.  For the first time in my career that began after I graduated from IIT Madras in 2001, I will no longer be seeking employment at a major (or start-up) corporation. I am leaving to pursue what has long been my dream and the singular goal of my career - to start my own company.

Today not only marks the end of what is perhaps the most defining experience in my career so far, but also the beginning of my last 17 days of residence in the United States of America. After 7 years in 3 different cities of the US I’m moving back to the only country that is my home, India.

People close to me have always known that when I first set foot on American soil on January 20th, 2002, I had every intention of tracing this exact path through my time in the US and eventually returning to India one day. And following through on a promise I made to myself all those years ago is a truly liberating feeling. I don’t know if the word “liberating” quite captures how I feel, but knowing that I am still in control of my life and not yet the victim of inescapable routine that seems to engulf us all as we grow older and more accustomed to a steady life, definitely feels quite liberating.

The logical question to ask (and no doubt one that I’ve been asked a lot these last few weeks) is why I’m choosing to leave the US and go back to India.

My arrival in the US was in pursuit of a dream that I had nurtured my entire life. I had been admitted to Wash U to pursue a degree in Computer Science and it was my shot at making my career in the only thing that ever truly captivated my imagination and it meant the world to me. It was a vindication of everything I had taught myself outside of classrooms (given that I was learning Chemical Engineering inside!) and a reinforcement of my belief that one’s determination and steady effort towards a goal could get you there, even if it was not obvious to everybody around you how you possibly could pull it off.

In the years I have spent living in the US I have grown to love and appreciate America for what it is. My varied experiences have influenced my growth and broadened my outlook as an individual, which is why I feel so overwhelmingly positive about the life I have led. As I often like to say, I may not be an American citizen but I am to some extent American in my thinking, having spent some of my most crucial years in the universities and companies of the US.

I am returning to India now mostly in pursuit of yet another dream. I say mostly because there are of course a multitude of reasons but the most important one is really about a dream. A dream that I have nurtured from the time I was first fascinated by the history of the great technology companies of America and when I first came across the word start-up. As I read everything I could on the subject, sitting on the trading desks at Morgan Stanley in New York, it became quite apparent to me that if I wanted to really do this myself some day I had to learn by being at a start-up to begin with. Where could I learn the ropes than at an actual start-up? Where could I gather the skills that were crucial to making an actual company out of nothing more than an idea and pure determination? Hillcrest Labs is where I trained to one day start my own company and today I’m moving on to the second and most important part of any real training course: doing it yourself.

I’m 28 years old and I owe myself a shot at pursuing my dream. It is time to follow up with action on what have only been words and thoughts so far. This is about doing what I truly believe in and irrespective of how this turns out in the end I know it will be one hell of a ride!

(Editorial note: This post was originally composed on April 24th, 2009, but did not make the presses at that time because of an intervening vacation in Hawaii.)

I will always remember the 4th of November, 2008 for the rest of my life. Not because I witnessed a momentous occasion in US history but that I witnessed and indeed felt part of a truly defining moment in the history of the world.

Barack Obama’s sweeping win of the US Presidential Election yesterday re-ignited the hope that millions around the world carry in their hearts for the promise that is democracy. That humans are capable of transcending their differences, rising above race, class, and creed, and acting together for a greater common purpose. That a people that were once bitterly divided over racial equality only 40 years ago can cross over into a new era and elect a black president, and truly deliver on the promise of liberty, equality, and opportunity that is the cornerstone of the American dream.

Obama’s speech last night moved me to tears in a way I had never experienced before. For me and millions of others around the world, America had become a new nation and had shown to the world that it could once again claim its place as the beacon of hope for democracy and its ideals, as a country where the possibilities are limitless. I could now hope that the injustice I had seen the last 7 years in America, mostly hidden away in corners of decrepit neighbourhoods, may one day only be told about in history books as atrocities of the past. I could now hope for an America that views its responsibilities to the world (and the planet) in a radically different way, one that breaks away from the arrogance that has characterized its behaviour this past decade.

The promise of this historic moment was so powerful that I forgot briefly that I am not an American citizen and that my association with this country had only begun a few years ago. But in today’s world, in which we are all global citizens, does it matter that I belong to a land 10,000 miles away?

I realized that I care deeply about what had transpired here in the US because of what Obama stands for and his message to people everywhere, not just in America. I believe that in the decades and centuries to come, people all around the world will be inspired by Obama and this historic election in much the same way people have been inspired by Gandhi and MLK. I say this because I hope that one day the Indian democracy, the largest in the world, will too scale the same heights in what people believe is possible through self-determination in a multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic country.

Many years from now, I know I will be telling my children about this day. The day that Obama and America reminded the world that there always is hope. Always.

I’m sorry I’ve had to turn off comments on posts. I’m assuming, of course, that I still have readers left who want to leave me comments As it turns out, the spam problem has gotten really bad and I haven’t found the time to invest in getting the Captcha anti-spam plugin to work. When I do, things should go back to normal and comments will be enabled again!

In the meantime, if you want to say something, please write to me at ravi at rpmduplex dot net. I’d love to hear from you!

We Indians sure are a melodramatic lot. If you live a while in India, it won’t take you long to conclude that it’s not just our movies that love to resort to it at the drop of a hat (I will admit though that the new wave of Indian cinema is different in this regard) but that even the average auto-driver on the streets of Hyderabad has a penchant to resort to melodrama without much provocation at all.

In truth, it is an affliction that affects everybody from politicians who make sweeping statements on camera (NT Rama Rao, former CM of Andhra Pradesh, perfected this to an art when he was alive) to business leaders who use the media to make bombastic pronouncements as if they were actors in the grandest soap of them all.

This past week saw much the same penchant for melodrama on display, as Jet Airways unceremoniously laid off 1900 of its employees and then turned right around and hired them back in a heartbeat as the political and media heat got turned up on them.

The whole incident was ridiculous at so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin.

Let’s start with Jet Airways and the manner in which they went about laying people off. Clearly, the once-booming aviation sector in India has hit a really rough patch. With the price of oil more than doubling over the last year and the global financial meltdown hitting home, it was clear that the airline had to do some serious cost-cutting or run the risk of going bankrupt. While any professionally-managed company would go about this in a more sensible way, Jet decided that the best way to inform employees that they were being terminated was by announcing it to the media! Wait, the stupidity doesn’t end there. Employees were called up at the end of their day and simply told not to bother coming back the next! If there was ever the worst possible execution of a round of layoffs, this had to be it.

But it didn’t end there, of course. Before you knew it, there was an uproar amongst politicians, one of whom promised Jet that none of its flights would take off from Mumbai unless it took all employees back without condition. The ultimate quote came from Veerappa Moily, who said, “Hire and fire is not a proper labour policy… we do not approve [of] this.” The Congress also added, “India is not America.”

There you have it, the classic Indian socialist mindset mixed with hypocrisy at its best. We love capitalism only as long as it’s boom-time!

And sure enough, two days later, Jet’s Chairman, Naresh Goyal, announced that it was his decision to reinstate all employees who had been laid off.

“I apologise for all the agony you went through,” he told a news conference in Mumbai, adding that he could not bear to “see tears in their eyes”. “The management will have to understand sometimes in a family there are disagreements, but the father of the family decides.”

Although it was stressed over and over that the decision was not made under political pressure, I think we all know what went on behind the scenes!

This whole incident, I believe, is a reminder of how our country’s brush with globalization until now has been one really long party, starting from the early 90s. Salaries went up, up, up. You could change jobs every month of the year and only scale greater heights. The stock market kept smashing records and made us all feel like we had truly arrived on the global stage. In all the euphoria, nobody really cared that globalization is really a two-way street.

But make no mistake, the global financial crisis will take its toll in India. There will be retrenchment, cost-cutting and an overall slowdown of growth. People will be reminded that what goes up must indeed come down.

As they say in America, “The party’s over.”