4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the name of this project?

Kashyap Deorah: Chalo.

Sramana Mitra: How long was that?

Kashyap Deorah: We sold the company in less than a year. After the acquisition, some of us stayed at OpenTable. I left after two years. One important moment there was that OpenTable was a public company. That’s what made it attractive for us to sell that soon.

OpenTable got acquired by the Booking.com group. Booking was looking at a lot of the food commerce players in the early days. That made the stock value even higher for us. The handcuffs came off.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have earnouts in your deal?

Kashyap Deorah: We did. The Booking.com acquisition accelerated some of those earnouts. We had distributed across enough number of restaurants by that time. On the consumer side, a huge catalyst was that Apple launched Apple Pay. We were chosen as one of the early pre-release partners of Apple Pay.

The first screen that the world saw in the keynote for in-app payments was Pay with OpenTable. That introduced this product to the consumers. Post this acquisition, there was a big change in management at OpenTable. It was a good time.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2016 timeframe?

Kashyap Deorah: Around 2015.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Kashyap Deorah: My wife has been keeping track of all the times I moved her across continents during this whole journey. She was fed up with all this. She is a policymaker. She is a researcher in renewable energy.

I asked her what she wanted to do next. We took about five to six months off with our two-year-old. He’s nine now. We traveled the world. She had first dibs on what to do next. The regulators and policymakers of India at this time were working closely with my wife’s group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. They said, “We want one of you to come and be the renewable energy regulator for the country for clean energy.” Shruti got that job. We were in Easter Island at that time. That’s when she interviewed with them.

We moved to New Delhi. I didn’t have my next idea then. I’m a Bombay boy. I started writing some stuff. One of the publishers in India read the blog and reached out asking if I wanted to write a book. The whole Indian startup scene is exploding. My outside-in view of that was while it was a huge moment for the Indian startups, I actually thought that there was some bubble dynamics building up. He said, “Why don’t you write about it?” I just started writing.

One thing led to another, we published the book that fall. It timed very well with the bubble burst that happened. This was India’s own bubble burst. It was related to a crash in the China market, which is also part of the thesis that we are being pegged as the next China. The book ended up getting widely read. During that time, the HyperTrack idea came about.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack
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