Sarath Babu

Sarath Babu is from IIM, Ahmedabad. He was in media for rejecting offers from big companies to start one on his own. Well! He founded "Food King Caterers" out of Ahmedabad & got it expanded to Chennai. He acknowledges that the brand "IIM" gave him a good lift-off for his venture. He had proved that big-brands has great-values. Jumping-in to kickstart a business right after college should have been tough. But this bold mindset & compulsion came from his childhood perils.

Rediff has a good coverage of his whole life. Read it here. One can hear such a story only in movies or novels. It feels good that its from a real life.

Sarath encourages youngsters to become entrepreneurs, so they could provide jobs to other people. Though it sounds similar to earning money by writing a book titled "How to generate money"? >:O) He also tells children, "It does not cost 'money' to dream".

His inspiration is his mother. She had an understanding of what education can do to a person's life. She sold idlis on the pavements of Chennai to educate her son. During daytime, she worked to prepare mid-day meal at the school. In the evenings, she taught at the government's adult education programme.

Sarath recalls, "For kids living in a slum, idlis for breakfast is something very special."

Nothing more can lucidly state his financial position.

Our take: There are always people to Inspire. Lets make best use of them!

After a StandStill

Startup Starters went inactive for a while. Now back with some updates:

• Blogger's beta update to be mainstream.

Blogger is taking too long a time to integrate its Beta version. We can't wait, our blood is on boil.

• Template changes.

New Template has been incorporated.

• Inclusion of entrepreneurs without web-blogs.

Yeah! We'll include them as we go by.

• Guest bloggers.

We have a guest. Check out "Authors" in the sidebar. In case you are interested. Please contact us.

• Formalizing a logo.

Logo is Ready. Need to add some flesh with colors.

• more interactivity with readers.

You can comment & prove this. >:O)

On a Standstill

Start-up Starters will be motionless for a few weeks from now. It is basking for

• Blogger's beta update to be mainstream.
• Template changes.
• Inclusion of entrepreneurs without web-blogs.
• Guest bloggers.
• Formalizing a logo.
• more interactivity with readers.

Please submit your email ID in the box to the right of this page, we'll buzz you when we come back. Thank-you for your support.

Rajesh Jain

http://www.emergic.org/: Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets.

Rajesh is my guru who sparked the spirit of entrepreneurship in me. He is BTech in Electrical Engg from IIT Bombay, also Masters in Electrical Engg from Columbia University. He launched India's 1st ever internet portal , IndiaWorld. It was later acquired by Sify for a whopping 115 million USD. His latest venture is Novatium which is into building thin clients. I guess it is building hard-infrastructure for all the soft-tools from Google Labs. >:O)

Rajesh is a multi-faceted man, having perennial interest in emerging markets, such as mobile & affortable computing. His blog gives birth to 5~6 posts every day with opinions & excerpts from various websites & blogs. He also writes a lot about entrepreneurship.

Update #0: A more accurate description of what Rajesh is doing is here.

Sujai Karampuri

http://sujaiblog.blogspot.com/ - E=mc^2

Sujai is a NITian from Warangal. He went on to do his masters in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technological University. Sujai had worked in Alcatel & Sasken before to start Sloka Telecom.

Yeah! Sloka is founded by himself & another guy from Nortel to make base station boxes for the next-generation wireless networks. They plan to supply wireless infrastructure products combining WiMAX and 3G worlds, specially base stations. They are trying to commoditize them so that, deployment at a mass level becomes a viable option.

Sujai is an artist himself, has an opinion on why there is nudity in art forms. Being an atheist from age 7, writes

If God was so perfect, he wouldn't have created me - Sujai
If Man was so perfect, he wouldn't have invented me - God

If he is, how could he name his company "Sloka" Telecom, I'm just wondering!

Sujai's favourite quote is:

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality."

Does this disturb you? He goes on to say:

"Opinions are like assholes- everyone has one"! These are my opinions. They don't matter much because they do not bring any change. People live as ever - spitting, throwing garbage, cheating, bribing, but leading a moral life - not smoking, not eating meat, not visiting a prostitute.

Sujai is a fundoo dude, rational & straight. Do dig his blog. Quite interesting. May 'Sloka' be an enchanting success!

Sujai also maintains Wireless India, a blog focussing on Wireless Industry and Entrepreneurship in India.

Sunil Goyal

http://www.wirkle.com/blogs/sunil/ - Personal views, technology, wireless, semantic web, internet, ambient intelligence.

Sunil is a Mathematics & Computing grad from IIT Delhi. He worked as a Researcher in Semantic Web Technologies at Salzburg, Austria for around 2.5 years before starting his own. He along with his colleagues from IIT Delhi, founded Wirkle Inc.,
a mobile social networking startup.

Sunil on Wirkle:

Wirkle will provide personalized content on wireless devices. It will develop an alternate channel for data services which on one hand are highly personalized for a user and secondly enable content providers to enable their existing web content for wireless and make that available in a personalized fashion.

Yes, Wirkle is developing a Wireless Content Platform for distribution of content on mobile devices. Its a product based company & is building its product in wireless data services sector. In the long run, they aim to customise and have a India specific product.

May their dreams come real. Head on to his mobile centric blog.

Munjal Shah

http://munjal.typepad.com/ - Recognizing Deven.

Munjal has an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, a BS from UCSD. Feeling relief that he's not from IIT? His father is an IITian! >:O) Born & brought up in US, Munjal was nominated to be one of the top 10 "Up and Comers" in Business week in 2001. He had previously worked for Baan, IBM and Blaxxun, and co-founded Round Zero, a Web 1.0 networking forum for early stage entrepreneurs. He has also been the CEO and Co-Founder of the successful eBay seller auction management service, Andale. He knew nothing was impossible and set out to put together a team to make it happen.

Munjal's recent experimentation is Riya,  a photo search portal with use of face & text recognition features. With offices in San Mateo & Bangalore, the company employs 50 people, 44 of them engineers, and 14 of those Stanford PhDs.

Saying about the key driver behind Riya:

First, it was just need. I personally have saved 31,000 photos and I just couldn't find anything. Frequently my sister and others would be like, Did you give me all those photos of my son? And I'd be like, Oh, no, I don't have the time to do that. So I think that was an element.

The second was that I spent some time in Korea before I started this company and noticed that they have these high-resolution camera phones now 2 MP, 3 MP and consumers there are taking ten pictures a day because they have these high-resolution camera phones, so I just started realizing, Wow, the number of photos people are taking is going to go up, hence the need for a photo search is going to go up even more than the three hundred billion. So, those were two major reasons.

The third, less so initially and more so later, is that I dug in there and I realized, you know, Yahoo images and Google images the existing photo technology hasn't changed in ten years. Nothing. It's just been looking at some text around the photo, and that doesn't do a very good job if you've ever used those products. So, it's like, wow, there's a need that's growing dramatically, and a need I personally feel, and at the same time, something very few others have invested in to try to make better.

About his blog, Munjal's words:

I think a blog can't be overly focused as a strategy or it loses its authenticity, and so it just kind of has to be you, and it just has to be you with all your spelling mistakes and all your imperfections and it just kind of has to be you having conversations with a lot of different people.

I'll be direct about this and say that this is also kind of a way that we're marketing the company, and we're not hiding that, but it's not something that we're trying to hide in any way. It's part of being authentic.

So, you know, the blog itself is just me for all intents and purposes, and if that happens to help Riya, great. It's something I want to continue even beyond Riya for a while, in fact. I kind of feel dumb that I even had the epiphany.

Announcement: So all entrepreneurs, kindly publish your thoughts thro' blogs. Its good for Start-up Starters. >:O)

Munjal's writings are all centred around Riya's development. Yeah! Its nice to watch how an internet company grows to impress people. Being passionate about life, he doesn't believe in limitations.

Rajdeep Sardesai

http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/author/1/rajdeepsardesai.html - Rajdeep Sardesai's Blog.

Rajdeep is an Economics (Hons) bachelor from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. Also a MA LLB from Oxford University. He had worked for "The Times of India", Mumbai, between 1988 & 1994 as City Editor & Head, News Service. Then he was with NDTV 24x7 for the next 11 years. He was the host of the award-winning talk show "The Big Fight" on NDTV. As a Managing Editor of NDTV, Rajdeep put his papers to start his own company, Global Broadcast Network (GBN).

GBN had stitched a licencing deal with CNN, took over six months to cobble together a team comprising industry veterans, poaching heavily from NDTV. Some of the producers who worked with Rajdeep on "The Big Fight" also joined hands with him at hefty salaries. (Don't talk about attrition & referrals only in IT)

CNN, TV18 & GBN collaborated to start CNN-IBN. His colleague from NDTV, Sameer Manchanda was also in the team, CNN-IBN. Rajdeep's annual salary at NDTV was 3.6 million INR. He received about five times this, as the signing amount from TV 18, along with a brand new Toyota Corolla. Certainly, that wasn't his motivation.

He iterates,

"I had a dream of doing something on my own. I have got an opportunity and hence I am utilising it." "We will be launching a new channel that will be driven by the journalists. The emphasis will be on good journalism and journalistic stories."

Rajdeep, turned 40 last December shares how CNN-IBN is different from NDTV (or any other news channel).

We decided to break away from the pack. From Rohini Mohan eating sugarcane in Madurai during Pongal with children in the village to Himmika Chaudhari taking a dip in Gangasagar to Bikramjit preparing tilgul to Naveen Nair taking the climb up to Sabarimalai to Priyanjana Dutta covering the aarti in Bangalore to Revathi doing rangoli in Hyderabad to Swati in Jaipur flying kites with the Thakurs, there were a range of stories that explored the limits of plurality of this amazing country. Not to forget the remarkably effortless Paras Tomar selling kites on the streets of Ahmedabad. I think by showcasing a network of reporters, we were able to reflect the true spirit of 14th January. I have little doubt that other channels also will do similar experiments in the future, and that each channel has innate strengths, all benefitting the viewer who will now enjoy the buffet of news being laid out before him.

Currently, Rajdeep Sardesai is the Editor-in-Chief of the CNN-IBN news service. He writes mostly on Journalism & current affairs.

Kalyan Varma

http://kalyan.livejournal.com/ Kalyan Varma's Journal.

Kalyan is a Mech grad from PES College of Engineering, Bangalore. (Another Mech & not IIT) He worked as a system admin in his college & then as a trainee engineer at Exocore. Since 2001, he worked with Yahoo!, taking care of Asia Pacific application and data security needs & was also part of Global Application Security team. There he received the Global Yahoo! Super Star award for his contributions in the security space. So much in Yahoo, but there was something more exciting outside. Yeah! He quits Yahoo! and starts as a naturalist with Jungle Lodges, a government-owned ecotourism outfit.

He reason-outs like this:

I saw the film Jungle Book and that brought the change.

Photography is a costly affair & having run out of funds, necessity brings him in the path of an Entrepreneur. In 2005, he & his friend has founded Secuprise, security consulting startup.

Remarks on why 'Consulting':

Consulting is like a one night stand. You work for few days only, take a lot of cash and you will never need to work with or see the guy again. Ofcourse, if things are good and you have had a nice time, you could come back to the client. No long term commitments. more >>

He is a freshman to Entrepreneurship & stuff, so writes most about his wildlife encounters. He also maintains a daily photoblog.

Badri Seshadri

http://bseshadri.blogspot.com/ - Nothing Frivolous. Only Serious.

Badri is an alumnus of IIT Chennai who did his Bachelors in Mech Engg there. Then, he earned his doctorate from Cornell University. In 1993, Badri along with several others had co-founded Cricinfo.com, the largest single-sport website on the internet. Until 2005, Badri held several postions (COO, CTO, MD, Director Commercial) in Cricinfo Ltd. Then moved out to become the MD of New Horizon Media Private Limited, one of his own regional language-publishing venture.

Speaking about the move from Cricinfo, Badri says:

The move has to do with my interest in starting companies rather than being employed with one.

My heart is in a startup where things are topsy turvy and every day struggle is an excitement in itself.

Badri writes about Politics, society, economics, technology and education in India. He also maintains a tamil blog, எண்ணங்கள். He is happened to be one of the ancient (>:O) tamil bloggers in the Internet. From a hard-core mechanical engg background to a print media, the journey is driven by sheer passion. Congratulations & Best wishes.

Let's start here

Start-up Starters is a collection of weblogs of entrepreneurs who are originally from India.

It is a directory of People who heard their passion speaking, deviated from the usual course of employment & headed to create it, stopped complaining about their bosses & managed to become one. Ok. Lets stop here & see who are all be the part of this boat.

If you have some suggestions for us to improve, do write to StartupStarters [at] gmail [dot] com

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Information in this site may contain errors or inaccuracies; the site's authors do NOT MAKE WARRANTY as to the correctness or reliability of the site's content.

If you could TELL us about our mistakes, we would be happy to correct ourselves & thats about it.

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About

Startup Starters is a weblog about the Entrepreneurs of India.

Its a directory of People who heard their passion speaking, deviated from the usual course of employment & headed to create it, stopped complaining about their bosses & managed to become one. Ok. Stop here & see who are all the part of this boat.