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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Indian entrepreneur
Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: It’s not really operating experience. It’s consulting. Ambarish Gupta: If you want to join PE, you need operating experience, for which you have only two options. You either work for a corporate for five years or you work for consulting firms for two years. Two or three years is quite a short time
Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. [Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India] Selling technology to small businesses in India is hard work. Customers are uninitiated to technology’s sophistication, and have expectations of high-touch customer service even when they pay little in subscription fees.
India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 7)
Sramana: You own the company 100%. How do you incentivize your employees aside from salary? Do you have a private stock option plan? Arvind Agarwalla: We do not have a stock option plan, and that would not make sense because I really have no intention of exiting the company. Our sales team operates with an
India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 6)
Sramana: Have you lost clients to the companies that offer an SaaS model? Arvind Agarwalla: We have not lost any clients to the public cloud. We offer our clients a private cloud option. We allow our clients to determine what kind of security they want. They allow what branches they want to connect to the
India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 5)
Sramana: In the history of any company, a few key people become the legs on which the table stands. Who were those people for you, and how did you find them? Kolkata was not the hotbed of management talent. Arvind Agarwalla: If you look at a product company, research and development is one leg. Sales
India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 4)
Sramana: It sounds like your market started to mature by 1991. Arvind Agarwalla: It was getting mature by then. We had started advertising, we had strong word-of-mouth recommendations, and we had a good user base. People recognized us as a software company. Our customers felt we delivered very effective software, and our pricing was extremely
India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 3)
Sramana: How did you deal with the piracy situation? It was pretty bad in the 1980s and 1990s. Arvind Agarwalla: The first thing we decided to do was implement copy protection on our software. Of course a lock can be broken, but we had to copy protect it or we would not be able to
India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 2)
Sramana: When you first started the company, how did you get the product into the market? How did you build the product and acquire your first customers? Arvind Agarwalla: I set up the company at the end of 1987. My first colleague was a very good friend of mine and remains a close friend to
