Vijay Shekhar Sharma, ranked 1,394th on the list with a fortune of $1.7 billion, is the only Indian billionaire in the under-40 league.
Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, 39, is the youngest Indian billionaire, while 92-year-old Samprada Singh, chairman emeritus of Alkem Laboratories, is the oldest, according to Forbes.
Sharma, ranked 1,394th on the list with a fortune of $1.7 billion, is the only Indian billionaire in the under-40 league.
Sharma founded fast-rising mobile wallet Paytm in 2011. He has also created Paytm Mall, an e-commerce business business and Paytm Payments Bank.
“One of the biggest beneficiaries of India’s demonetisation, Paytm has notched up 250 million registered users and 7 million transactions daily. Sharma owns 16 per cent of Paytm, which is now valued at $9.4 billion,” Forbes said.
Of the 2,208 billionaires in Forbes’ 2018 list of the world’s richest, just 63 are under the age of 40 and more than half (34) are self-made entrepreneurs.
In all, the 63 youngest billionaires in the world are worth a collective $265 billion, up from $208 billion last year.
Meanwhile, 92-year-old Samprada Singh, who is the chairman emeritus of Alkem Laboratories, is the oldest Indian billionaire. He was ranked 1,867th on the list with a fortune of $1.2 billion.
Singh founded the pharma firm Alkem Laboratories 45 years ago. Singh worked in a chemist’s store before venturing out on his own distributing pharmaceuticals.
“Shares of the generics maker, known for its antibiotics Clavam and Taxim, have more than doubled since its November 2016 IPO. For the year ended March 2017, Alkem reported a 20 per cent rise in net earnings to $139 million on revenues of $913 million,” Forbes said.
At just 24, he has made his name in the start-up world and comes across as a charismatic young entrepreneur.
More than talent, skills or resources, it is the willingness to keep pushing your limits which brings you face to face with success. This incredible story is about a 24-year-old who everyone thought was a good for nothing chap but the very same people today can’t stop obsessing over his success. His unconventional ideas have made him the CEO of a company which has been valued at Rs 11 crore despite a very short span of operation.
Meet charismatic Gaurav Rana who grew up in a tiny, nondescript village named Sonf in Haryana. The wealth of his father had exhausted by the time he was five years old and all that was left for him was daily struggle with poverty. His father had become an alcoholic and was suffering from mental trauma. Whatever little money came their way was from his grandfather who ran a grocery store. They managed to buy food but couldn’t afford LPG to cook it so Gaurav and his elder sister spent all day collecting wood and cow dung in and around the village. The kids would make cow dung cakes and pass them on to their mother who would then cook some food for them.
To divert his attention from the painful life Gaurav started painting. Well-off children came asking him to draw for them and would in-turn give him Rs 20. While he was in STD 8 he started going to a nearby salon and learnt the art of haircut and shaving. The owner let him handle a few customers everyday and give him some commission for his help. The situation at home was still as grim as ever and the only way out seemed to be in education. In STD 10 Gaurav scored 96.9% and took admission in a deemed university in Agra where his grades dropped consistently and he couldn’t even touch 60% by the time he passed out.
“I couldn’t appear for placement interviews because I scored abysmal 58%. I pleaded with my teachers and got a chance to appear in one interview”. His low grades fetched him just one chance but he cracked it. He got a job with Eicher Motors for a monthly salary of Rs 15,000. But this good news was overshadowed by problems at home. His parents were burdened under a sum of Rs 2 lakh that they had borrowed from friends and relatives who wanted their money back.
“I had no money to go to Indore and join Eicher. There was no question of borrowing money as all our relatives had turned hostile. I was heartbroken to see how people change and decided to end our financial struggles somehow”, Gaurav recollects.
A friend’s mother helped him and he reached Eicher, Indore. He did night shifts there and worked as a dance teacher and event organizer in the day time. Gradually, he paid off all the credits his family has taken but had also realized that he couldn’t do job all his life. He was giving more and more time for organizing events which reflected poorly at his performance in his company.
“People had tagged me useless, for them I was good for nothing”, he says.
However, the perception of people changed when he did an event with FTV and the news splashed all over the newspapers. To celebrate his success he went back to him home in Haryana where his mother worked as a local beautician. She had to attend a client that day and the person was coming in every few hours to remind her of the task. Gaurav saw a gap here and thought he could fill this up with technology.
He came back to Eicher and couldn’t stop thinking about his idea. At the company’s annual party he got to know that the VP’s wife has 25 years of experience in IT. Despite his friends warnings, he boldly approached the woman and pitched her the idea and asked if she would collaborate on this. To his utter surprise she agreed and became the initial investor for Calipso, a company that delivers beauty services wherever the customer is.
The idea was unique and has become a major hit in Indore. Calipso has tied up with OYO rooms and several beauty salons to reach out to their customers. The latest trend that Gaurav has introduced in the industry is setting up stalls at weddings. “Nobody even thought of doing this even when there was a clear need for it. Ladies now chat away while getting a pedicure at weddings while men get a touch-up down after sweating it out on the dance floor,” Gaurav says in his thick Hariyanvi accented Hindi.
On being asked about competing against other doorstep beauty servicing giants he says, “I don’t think there is any competition because no matter how much funded they are they can never take away my guts from me.”
Currently, Calipso is operating in Indore, Bhopal and Ujjain making its way to expand in metros next.
Today, Gaurav employs more than 25 people and Calipso is valued at over Rs 11 crore. At just 24, he has made his name in the start-up world and comes across as a charismatic young entrepreneur.
“My relatives who had stopped speaking with us are now cordial again. One should always remember that times keep changing and hardwork pays off, every single time”, he said.
FairPencil, aims to help people solve the various challenges faced in terms of house designs/architecture and provide design solutions.
FairPencil: Catering to your perfect house design solutions through a blend of modern architecture and innovative ideas
Yatish Jain is a young entrepreneur who hails from Udaipur and through his entrepreneurial venture, FairPencil, aims to help people solve the various challenges faced in terms of house designs/architecture. Jain is a graduate in the field of architecture from DY Patil, Pune. Recognising the problems people faced on the architectural front while setting up a house, led him to involve technology in the field of traditional real estate business owned by his father, Mr. Kalu Lal Jain, Arihant Property and taking his passion for the field a step further by setting up FairPencil.
FairPencil is a unique house design solution app which looks to help and guide people by providing them aesthetic architectural options which are original and modern. It also aims at simplifying the process of designing and creating these designs more hassle-free through its one-of-a-kind calculator which provides requirements of plot area by making use of a few simple inputs. Keeping the different kind of audiences in mind, the app has been divided into the Design Blog, the Vastu Blog and the Project Showcase which are essentially knowledge hubs for architects.
“It is an initiative created with an aim to give all type of ideas and details about the designing of a house and other spaces. Initially, if you will take a look at FairPencil, we intend to add guidelines, blogs, and even more for the people who are related to designing of space and construction. Or, the ones who are thinking to construct and design their house in an entirely new way.” -Yatish Jain
For people looking for unique designs and decorations for their home, FairPencil, is boon as by making use of accurate measurements, the app offers them decor ideas and designs to choose from. The designs suggested by the app are nothing short of a visual delight and the range offered is varied and scintillating.
The initiative also extends a horizon of opportunities for architects and interior designers who can appeal to a wider audience base by simply contributing to the FairPencil blog. Apart from providing solutions, the app is beneficial to students and budding architects as it imparts tips by experienced architects and also provides them with a platform to showcase their talent.
Anjana Reddy, Founder of Universal Sportsbiz Pvt Ltd (USPL), which owns the brands Collectabillia, Imara and Wrogn is not your usual girl.
They say that breaking away from legacy is the hardest thing to do for the fourth generation individual in a business family. These individuals cannot survive in an environment governed by age-old structures that do not move with the times. It is only honourable that these young seekers who are soul-searching and looking for a place in the business universe go out and ruffle some feathers in industry.
Anjana Reddy, Founder of Universal Sportsbiz Pvt Ltd (USPL), which owns the brands Collectabillia, Imara and Wrogn is not your usual girl. She is a go-getter who works 18-hours a day, loves cars, cares for eight dogs and builds Lego sets to ease her mind after a hard day’s work. If one meets this 28-year-old on the street they would not be able to tell that she runs a Rs 61-crore business well on its way to becoming a Rs 100-crore business by the end of this financial year. Nevertheless, her tenacity to succeed is what made her to break away from the beast of legacy that kills many a fertile mind in business families.
It’s 9 am in the morning and Anjana is already wrapping up her first meeting with her marketing team.
After that she is constantly in meetings with her design teams and vendors. She minces no words when she commands them to meet “delivery timelines” of the clothing lines on order. She has at her beck and call over 100 factories that make clothing for her brands Wrogn (men’s clothing line), and Imara (women’s clothing line). By late afternoon she is working out the sales projections for the next quarter and is readying the launch of her third brand soon.
Anjana loathes slow progress. The recent lock-outs in Bengaluru because of political unrest has got her concerned about her delivery schedules. “I cannot have my trucks waiting at the border. It delays my supplies to the consumer and I cannot lose the consumer,” she says.
By evening she has a coterie of celebrities that she has to handle. “Yes, I will get it done,” she says to a high-profile person, who is the wife of a south Indian superstar. “I cannot ignore her,” she adds. Late in the evening she has several phone calls with investors and then reclines in her chair deep in the knowledge that it is only 9 pm and she still has four more hours of work to catch up on.
Image credit: chaibisket.com
With the likes of Virat Kohli and Shraddha Kapoor as her brand ambassadors Anjana Reddy has her schedule blocked for the next six months. This entire bustle is part of a plan to build the most well-known brand in the country for the youth. No wonder no one knows the face behind the brands other than the famous people representing them.
“There is a reason I do this. There is no brand that is youth-focussed and aspirational,” says Anjana Reddy. She adds that to create a brand one must understand aspiration, the quality of the material and the styling, and not just playing to discounts. She makes it very clear that the GMV game played by e-commerce companies is not sustainable. To scale up she followed a 60:40 offline-to-online strategy, which has worked to bring in revenues.
Her brands sell in 73 Shoppers Stop stores, as a shop-in-shop, and retails in e-commerce sites like Myntra. She has six offline stores owned by her company of her brands and is planning to launch at least 100 more stores by the end of next year. Currently, the company retails around 15 lakh units a year and is in the process of closing its Series-C round. Anjana reveals that she is expected to close a large round of funding, which will go into adding four more warehouses across the country to the current one and in strengthening the brand along with the supply chain.
Anjana and her 350-member-strong team are all set to become a Rs 500-crore business by 2019. But that’s not how the story began back in 2010.
After finishing her graduation –in 2011 and her post graduate studies in the US, Anjana had three options. She could join her family’s media business, take up a corporate job in the US or do the most difficult of all things, which was to become an entrepreneur. Eventually, she chose to become an entrepreneur. Interestingly, she founded a company called Collectabillia in her final year in college. The premise was to source sports products and paraphernalia owned by super stars and sell them online.
Since her family owned the cricket franchise team called Deccan Chargers at one time – and the fact that in the USA, where she was studying, branded sports merchandise was a big business – Anjana conceived this idea around sports memorabilia. She began sourcing goods from sports agencies that handled the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and footballers playing in the English Premier League. “Again I was obsessed with building a brand and I went all out to work with the best sporting names,” says Anjana.
Eventually, in 2012, Sachin Tendulkar became one of the co-investors in a Series-A round in Collectabillia, when the company raised $2.7 million. At the time Anjana was over the moon because she had chased Sachin for over a year for his involvement. “It’s not easy to get people to back a youngster with an idea,” she says. Accel Partners had partnered in that first round too betting on the fact that there was a room to build brands away from the usual e-commerce businesses. They eventually put in $7.26 million to build this company.
Just when she thought she had it made, the sports memorabilia business did not scale up. The company had burnt close to a million dollars and Anjana had to make a quick decision to turn around the business. She noticed that branded apparel – endorsed by celebrities – was selling very well on the platform. In late 2013 she met investors and explained to them that she could make a turn around by launching two apparel brands. There were people within the industry who wrote the youngster off. With just 30 people on board at the time she brought in some designers to build a clothing line. She quickly launched two brands – Imara and Wrogn.
Things were not easy, as the factories that USPL approached in 2014 asked them to provide huge guarantees and did not want to supply small quantities. Anjana made USPL take that bet and worked on her masterstroke business strategy.
In the summer of 2014 she made an unprecedented bet that could have made her business or killed it. Virat Kohli was going through a tough series in England and all the punters had written him off, saying his best had passed. Even Virat himself was not sure of signing up with a brand called Wrogn especially after failing to perform in the England series. However, the persistence from Anjana’s team prevailed over the cricketer’s reluctance and they convinced him that he was signing up with a brand that was catering to his fan base.
The next thing you know, it all played out like a fairy tale. The brand became a runaway success and Virat became a bigger star than before because of his exploits in Australia in late 2014. In six-months’ the youth began to look at the brand as a clothing line owned by Virat Kohli.
Now combined with the success of Imara, the company began to increase its revenues and it closed the financial year 2014-2015 with Rs 24 crore in revenue. The last financial year it more than doubled its revenues to close at Rs 61 crore.
“We invested in Collectabillia when most others were wary of a brand-centric model,” says Mahendran Balachandran, partner at Accel Partners. He says that there was a clear white space in the 16-to-35-year-age group fashion category. “While some of the international brands were able to enter the market early, there were still gaps when it came to product and style assortment at affordable price points,” says Mahendran.
So the bet paid off for Anjana when she decided to create high-quality, celebrity-led fashi
“Building a brand is what we set out to do more than a decade ago and it is important for every entrepreneur, regardless of the industry that they cater too, to think of building a brand,” says Kishore Biyani, Chairman and MD of Future Group. He says it was very important to understand young India’s aspiration to build a fashion brand.
Mahendran adds that building a brand had inherent challenges and risks. “It was our strong faith in the founding team that hedged our risk,” he says.
The company is yet to turn profitable. If you look at all retail businesses they work on high volumes and low margins. The average break-even period for a brand is five years. USPL has all the right ingredients to launch multiple brands and it will focus on reaching consumers in smaller cities.
For Anjana the future is only secure when she knows that she has built multiple brands that associate with the consumer, and the celebrity is the face of it. She is happy to be sitting back and making things work at the corporate level as a leader. Her younger brother Vikram Reddy supports her in running the operations of the company. No doubt her qualities are bestowed upon her by the blessings of her parents and grandparents, whom she considers as her inspiration.
This article was originally published in YourStory
He along with Franchise India, announced the launch of The Great Khali Gym & Fitness Club, an exclusive chain of luxury gym and fitness centres, which led to his entry in the field of entrepreneurs.
Dalip Rana popularly known as The Great Khali who has won accolades in the field of wrestling for the country. Recently, he along with Franchise India, announced the launch of The Great Khali Gym & Fitness Club, an exclusive chain of luxury gym and fitness centres, which led to his entry in the field of entrepreneurs.
The first gym is to be opened up in Jaipur followed by Delhi and the partners aim to open up a hundred centres in India in the next three years. Some fitness centres will be present in Tier-II and Tier-III cities as well.
“The Great Khali Gym and Fitness club aims to establish itself as a unique player in the crowded India fitness industry. We desire to present gymnasiums as family friends places by incorporating dedicated kids and lounge areas.” -Dalip Rana
What sets the gym apart from other fitness centres is that it will be modelled around the theme of wrestling and an automated recording of The Great Khali will welcome everyone who enters the gym. The gym is spread across a sprawling 5000 sq feet approximately which allows enough space for heavy machinery. Each gym will also have the following facilities:
A marathon track
Jaccuzzis
Spas
Kids area
Sweat room
The project is huge as there is an initial investment of a few crores but the each gym looks forward to 700 members each year and recovering the investment in two years.
“Khali is a brand in himself and has a large dedicated following in India. We are happy to be associated with his entrepreneurial venture and we are sure it will get a strong foothold among fitness lovers across country.”– Franchise India Chairman Gaurav Maria
Pujashoppe.com offers complete solutions by offering access to religious festivals and pujas all across the country both online and its chain of religious stores keeping in mind the purity and utmost quality in every product and services we offer.
Free Wi-Fi is the dream of every youngster nowadays. The first thing that they do whenever they go out or check into a new restaurant or hotel, is to check about the Wi-Fi services provided by them. Banking on this enthusiasm about Wi-Fi, an Indian start-up has come up with a unique way to facilitate devotees to have ease of performing puja.
Pujashoppe.com offers complete solutions by offering access to religious festivals and pujas all across the country both online and its chain of religious stores keeping in mind the purity and utmost quality in every product and services we offer.
How the temple would be benefitted
Pujashoppe.com would design a web page specially for the temple and promote it through its popular portal and other media thus making it reach its global devotees.
The devotees visiting temple can log into the temple webpage free of cost while visiting the temple.
Devotees can also gather dynamic information about the temple as temple authorities would have complete access to the webpage.
User will simply enable his mobile device in temples where they will see Pujashoppe free wi-fi signs.
Once it is connected to Pujashoppe Wi-Fi, He/she can open his web browser and search from any website which will redirect you to the login page.
User will just have to fill his required details (Name and mobile number) and submit, he would immediately receive a onetime password (OTP) on his smart phone. Once logged in he can use it to visit the temple webpage along with other websites of his choice. Maximum time for free use is 30 minutes.
The main objective of the proposed venture is to create a business out of a large market of puja related products and services, which has so far remained unorganized and try creating a brand. The venture is also aimed at facilitating devotees to have ease of performing puja.
Allegiance to religion has grown in the past few decades in India and worldwide and the market of puja materials and services have grown exponentially in the process. As per The Times of India the annual market of spiritual business in India is a US$ 15 Billion which translates to a whopping Rs. 1,90,000 Crore. The opportunity of this venture lies in the fact that the entire market is being catered by unorganised and small local operators.
In order to achieve this goal a business idea has been conceptualized to offer these products and services online through a portal named PujaShoppe.com. The business is based on a simple idea that almost every Hindu wants to perform various pujas depending upon his allegiance and inclination; however many of them avoid doing for reasons such as lack of faith on the priests, their availability and expertise, lack of standardization and unscientific puja processes and poor quality of available puja materials in the market. Thus there exists a gap which can be addressed by creating a business to facilitate availability of premium quality of puja materials and allied services.
It has been observed in many a time that finding a priest with proper knowledge of the subject is a time consuming and rigorous task. Most often than not it is found that the priest may not be a trained one and does not have the requisite expertise. It has also been found that different priests do the same puja in different ways which means there are no standard protocols or practices that are followed. Thus there is a need of ‘standardization of puja processes’ and formulation of ‘best practices’ which would eventually give rise to a large market for a business. A corollary can be drawn from the fact that people prefer going to trained doctors rather than to quacks for their medical needs shelling out premium fees. Likewise the well informed devotees would prefer branded premium quality of puja materials and well trained priests with adequate expertise to unbranded poor quality products and untrained priests.
Diversity: The same puja is performed in different ways and different puja materials are used in various parts of the country. Thus a detailed research has to be carried out to cover every part of the country and knowledgeable priests have to be put on roll.
Database creation: Collection of the database of the priests and validating the data will be a rigorous task.
Large no of products handling and its logistics management.
PujaShoppe.com follows a unique hybrid model where in a customer can buy products and services through online, telephone or just by walking in our stores to be located at vantage points all over the country.
Achievement so far
PujaShoppe.com in a span of just six months has become the most popular website with the national Alexa rating of 7500.
It’s has already opened more than 15 stores in states like Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, West Bengal and Chattisgarh.
The ‘Art of Living’ organization of Shri Shri Ravi Shankar has entered into a strategic alliance with the organization for cross branding and cross merchandising.
The company is opening its first overseas store in Dubai in April and has plans to open stores in Singapore, UK, Malyasia and USA.
Future
Dr.Amushree, co-founder says, Pujashoppe.com has plans to establish as a global leader in the spiritual space.
Many global internet companies are battling this downtrend. Uber, LinkedIn, Twitter, Airbnb, Snapchat, Dropbox, Cloudera and Palantir are some of the internet stars that have been devalued by 15-60% in the past year by some of their mutual fund investors
After Flipkart facing markdowns in valuation to the tune of 20-40% from US mutual funds, another Indian tech unicorn is now under scrutiny.
The brokerage arm of HSBC—which initiated coverage on Info Edge (India) Ltd, the largest shareholder of Zomato—cut its valuation of the restaurant listing site by half to $500 million. Zomato, however, has dismissed the HSBC report.
But Flipkart and Zomato are not the only ones. Many global internet companies, too, are battling this downtrend. Uber, LinkedIn, Twitter, Airbnb, Snapchat, Dropbox, Cloudera and Palantir are some of the internet stars that have been devalued by 15-60% in the past year by some of their mutual fund investors. Publicly traded stocks of NYSE-listed Twitter and LinkedIn have fallen as much as 61% and 39%, respectively, from their peaks.
The mutual funds have not given any reason for the sharp cut in valuation, but analysts say the markdowns were preceded by an inflation in their valuations when these mutual funds pumped in millions of dollars into these startups.
BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and Wellington Management run or advise mutual funds that own shares in at least 40 closely held startups valued at $1 billion or more apiece, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The flood of money into startups pushed their valuations higher. The number of VC-backed private companies valued over $1 billion was 146 as of February this year, against 45 two years earlier, the report said.
Flipkart, which was last year ranked among the world’s top 10 startups, is subject to the growing skepticism among investors with four mutual funds—Fidelity Rutland Square, Valic Co 1, Morgan Stanley and T Rowe Price–marking down the value of the shares in the Indian company. These investors now value Flipkart between $9 billion and $11 billion. It is quite a climb down for Flipkart, whose valuation rose 15 times in four years to $15.2 billion by mid-2015.
Flipkart co-founder and executive chairman Sachin Bansal has shrugged off valuation concerns. He said late last month that the markdown was a theoretical exercise and not based on any real transactions.
However, critics of Flipkart’s growth model do not quite agree. “Look at Amazon stocks. It is growing,” said Mahesh Murthy, co-founder Seedfund. “Flipkart is the only one among the Indian ecommerce companies which got devalued,” he said. Amazon’s stock price has gained 55% in the past year.
In a recent article, Haresh Chawla, investor and a partner at India Value Fund Advisors, said Flipkart was in the middle of a crisis of its own making and observed that half of its gross merchandise value was from selling mobile phones, which was unsustainable.
Like Flipkart, Zomato has also downplayed reports of a markdown. “We have not raised any round since the last round of funding to have a valuation reset,” said the company spokesperson. “HSBC has never spoken to us, and doesn’t obviously understand our business well,” the spokesperson said.
Deepinder Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Zomato, wrote in an internal mail to employees that the company’s existing investors were “bullish about us, and are willing to back us further, if needed”.
Early-stage funding
The skepticism among Flipkart’s investors and the brokerage firm that evaluated Zomato’s performance clearly show a change in sentiment. They conform to the overall slowdown in the Indian tech funding scene. The fund crunch is more visible at the early-stage levels.
There is a growing sense of uneasiness within the Flipkart investors as they realize India’s top e-commerce firm to be overvalued. It is still to be seen by how much margin.
There is a growing sense of uneasiness within the Flipkart investors as they realize India’s top e-commerce firm to be overvalued. It is still to be seen by how much margin.
American mutual funds Fidelity Rutland Square Trust II and Valic Co. have joined US asset management firm T. Rowe Price and Morgan Stanley in reducing the value of their investments in Flipkart.
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the mutual fund managed by Fidelity Investments lowered the value of Flipkart shares it owns by almost 40% to $82 apiece as of 29 February 2016 from $135.8 in August last year. Valic marked down the value of its investment in Flipkart by 29% to $98.19 a share from $139 apiece.
In February, global brokerage firm Morgan Stanley had marked down its stake in the Indian e-commerce behemoth Flipkart by 27 percent. The mutual fund, called the Institutional Fund Trust Mid Cap Growth Portfolio, marked its stake in Flipkart at $103.97 per share.
T. Rowe Price slashed the holding value of its investment in Flipkart by 15.1% in its report for the quarter through March 2016.
None of the four firms have given a rationale for the valuation. Lowering valuation of Flipkart hasn’t come as a shocker to industry observers. Market observers have been anticipating correction in valuation of privately held Internet companies.
The markdowns come at a time when Flipkart is reportedly trying to raise more funds amid an intense battle with SoftBank-backed Snapdeal and the local arm of Amazon.com Inc to maintain its supremacy in the Indian e-commerce market.
After that funding galore in the initial years, things in the investment domain have started to slow down from past few years — specially Q4’15. Investors are now looking for a sustainable business model and profitability rather than just initial disruption through technology.
Flipkart also counts Tiger Global Management, Naspers, Accel Partners, Iconiq Capital, GIC, DST Global and Sofina Societe, among others, as investors.
Few financial experts opine that investors in Flipkart, Snapdeal and others would look to exit from these companies in the course of next two to three years.
For Varun Chandran life has been the biggest teacher, and the need to survive has been the biggest motivation.
“I just want to make a point that it’s not just great teachers who shape your life. Sometimes it’s the absence of great teachers that shapes your life, and being ignored can be just as good for a person as being lauded,” Julia Roberts.
For Varun Chandran life has been the biggest teacher, and the need to survive has been the biggest motivation.
He is today a millionaire who runs a tech firm out of Singapore and is spreading his wings across the globe. From being barely able to feed himself, to being able to create a global footprint is nearly impossible. But Varun has shown how it can be done.
Read his story to get a glimpse of a young India which is not apologetic of its humble background but is raring to make a difference in the world.
“I come from a small village in Kerala called Padam which is bordering a jungle in Kollam district. My father was a farmer and since childhood I learnt to work hard, helping him with his daily work. We did not have proper food to eat and managed to survive on the basic minimum. The need to live and survive defined my childhood. It pushed me to do better and be better. I learnt the value of labour,” says Varun Chandran, now 32 years old and Founder of Corporate 360, a firm which has operations in four continents today.
Born into a poor farmer’s family in Kerala, Varun strived for better. His parents had studied till class V but they wanted their sons to be educated. He was admitted to a school near his village in a small town called Pathanapuram. Hard physical labour came as an advantage since it gave him an edge to excel in sports. Soon, he started winning medals and prizes for his school, St.Stephens HSS.
After he finished class X, he was given a scholarship by the Kerala government to play football. “I would have had to leave studies if not for that scholarship.” He went on to make a significant mark in his football career by winning a gold medal for being the best youth footballer in Kerala. He captained Kerala Youth and Kerala University football teams.
When he was injured on the football field, he decided to take the biggest risk of his life: he quit football, left college, and moved to Bangalore to find a job.
And it was not easy.
Things were not smooth at home and there was pressure to support the family. “My grand-mother gave me her gold bangle to sell and told me to go somewhere to find my life. I packed my bag and left home,” Varun recalls a past that he can never forget.
In 2002, he came to Bangalore with a small bag and a little bundle of hope. Varun went on to learn everything about tech jobs and entrepreneurship at internet cafes. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, he also realized the need to speak good English. He bought a dictionary and spent a lot of time in public libraries devouring the novels of Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer and watched CNN to learn English.
“Reading a lot of books, I realised a whole wide world existed outside my village,” says Varun. Such was his hunger to learn that he was not content with reading fiction alone; he devoured non-fiction books too which not only became his guide but opened his eyes to the world of entrepreneurship as well.
“Footballer IM Vijayan has been my inspiration from my school days. He is like God to me. From living on the streets to selling soda and peanuts, he went on to become a top Indian footballer. I remember always thinking, if he can excel amidst so much hardship, then so can I,” says Varun.
“I worked in Bangalore, learnt about the internet by spending time in cyber-cafes and taught myself to be a programmer. I believe nothing is impossible. In fact, today with so much information available on the net, you can learn so much. Everything is available if we just want to learn.”
With this driving force, he worked in Bangalore for a couple of years and got himself a job offer in Singapore, where he moved in 2008. “Singapore was an eye-opener for me in terms of opportunities,” he reveals. He had to make things work in this new place. While he was working, he started coding a software tool for himself to make his job easier. Soon his colleagues found a lot of value in what he was doing. And that led to the birth of his venture Corporate360 (C360). “I saw people all around talking about Big Data and asked myself: how can we use all the data on the web to make companies grow and sell more?”
His company introduces innovative sales intelligence software for the tech industry. Some of the world’s largest IT-companies and tech startups are C360 clients. “A lot of companies talk about Big Data and Predictive Analytics for marketing methods, but they are not designed to be industry specific. Their algorithms are designed to grind transactional data and web behaviour hence providing generic data indicators,”says Varun. “We bring industry specific sales relevance to the customer, which enables them to create highly targeted sales campaigns to the right people at the right time with the right messaging,” informs Varun.
The flagship product, Tech SalesCloud is a cloud software, designed for IT marketers to avail comprehensive marketing campaign data services powered by Big Data, Patterns, Predictive Analytics, Competitive Intelligence, Contacts Intelligence, Web Analysis and IT research.
“Companies have made huge investments in CRM and Marketing Automation tools. But these tools are best efficient when fed with the right data sets. Our SalesCloud data platform helps to power-up marketing tools with the most qualified sales intelligence data thereby complementing your existing investments to get maximum ROI,” he says, adding, “We realised IT marketers are struggling to track constant changes happening in their target-base and a huge chunk of their marketing budget is spent on list purchases which has little ROI. So we decided to address this problem and introduced the first ever concept of ‘Data-as-a-Service’ for technology marketers. The SalesCloud IT marketing data platform is available as a subscription model with real-time data refresh and exclusive data maintenance support.”
The two-year-old company has recently crossed the million-dollar-mark and now has big plans ahead. The goal is to hit 5 million in revenues by 2015 and grow the team size to 30, expand data sets and open new offices in the US and Europe. “We have been approached by a few big players in our industry to buy us over with lucrative offers. But we decided against it. We love what we are doing and we decided to live our dreams.”
Varun branched off and opened an office in his hometown Pathanapuram in Kerala. “I want to create opportunities for people in my hometown. We do not lack talent but lack opportunities. There will be so many like me who have the drive to make things happen. I am going after them. We have built a proud and loyal team there,” he says.
Having come full circle in life, Varun shares his learnings: “Be curious, persevere and everything becomes possible. It’s a constant process but we need to learn every day to be positive.”
