Entrepreneurs are invited to the 222nd FREE online 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, July 10, 2014, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any of
Sramana: You talked about the work that you did for the State of Texas. What work did you do for IBM? Mohammed Farooq: We took the same model and replicated that with IBM for the State of Indiana. Indiana wanted the same thing and IBM needed help. IBM bought our services and the product that
Tomas Gorny: We never went bankrupt. We paid off all the creditors. We filed what is called ABC – assignment for the benefit of creditors. After we filed that, we dissolved the company. In 2001, I was left with no money and was in pretty much the same situation when I came to America. Sramana
Sramana Mitra: The truth is we have seen a lot of these people coming out and building companies. I think that trend is going to accelerate. Sebastian Stadil: That is my story as well. Before founding Scalr, I worked at a company where I was manually managing infrastructure for them. The experience that I got
Sramana: What did you do next? Mohammed Farooq: I decided to move back to Texas. My friends from the State of Texas Governor’s Office had called me back. They wanted to transform Texas technology due to health laws, so I took over as the CTO of Health and Human Services. I drove state wide transformations
Tomas Gorny: As a result, while I was building my tech business in the web hosting industry, I was doing whatever it takes – valet car parking, carpet cleaning – to survive. For two years, I lived on $3 a day in terms of food allowance. I even remember days when I didn’t have any
Sramana Mitra: Let me just comment on it before you go on. I think the framework that you’re setting is interesting because we have seen this in action especially over the last decade where there were a lot of functions that were getting outsourced to the various outsourcing providers and that are still being outsourced,
Sramana: What was your next career step after your successful project for the State of Texas? Mohammed Farooq: In 1999, a guy called Manoj Saxena started a company in Austin and I became his first employee. I joined them on a journey of entrepreneurship. When I was working for the State of Texas in the