Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 2)

SM: How large did you build your service business in terms of revenue?

SR and KC: At the end of five years, we were well past $1 million in an annualized run rate. We had grown the team to just under 50 people. At that point, we realized that it was as good a time as any to move out from the services model and start developing on our own.

We had worked primarily on Microsoft technologies up to that point, so we decided to develop a product that actually made Microsoft Office collaborative. That was in 2005, and during that time Google Docs and similar programs started to appear. [For most of them,] the primary focus was a hosted office application that companies would deliver via the Web. We thought that approach was too work intensive for the limited payout at the time. Our goal was to enable collaboration among various Microsoft Office users in the background. Our product was a plug-in that made Microsoft Office documents collaborative.

SM: Is that the product you’re selling now?

SR and KC: Not now. We did sell that product, and it was a niche product. It required people to have Microsoft Office and have a distributed or a highly collaborative work environment. We sold it here in India and had about a dozen customers.

SM: What kind of revenue did you generate?

SR and KC: Not much. Our average installation was $15,000.

SM: When did you decide to develop a full Office suite as your own Web-based product?

SR and KC: We have to deliver a preface to answer that question. When we developed our first product and started marketing it, we realized that we needed to bring in someone who had experience. That’s when we reached out to Sabeer.

SM: Sabeer is not easily reached, is he?

SR and KC: Absolutely not. We put out a lot of inquiries and never heard back from him. He gets hundreds of inquiries like ours daily. However, we knew his parents lived in Bangalore and that he came down to visit them. We also knew that he loved golf, and there is only one golf course close to where his parents live. We went there and tracked down a person who played golf with him and cajoled him to get us an audience with Sabeer. We managed to get a meeting with him, and we made our pitch in the coffee shop of the golf course.

SM: What did you pitch to him? Did you pitch the full-blown Microsoft Office competitor or just the plug-in?