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.