Sramana: What happened to that business? Manish Sharma: We were caught in the crash. Not a lot of people remember how fast that happened, but I definitely do! The company did not go anywhere. Sramana: What did you do after the dot com crash? Manish Sharma: We had 40 people in India at that point
Sramana: Where you trying to develop another company after you returned to India or did you decide to go back into services work? Manish Sharma: I continued forward with my goal of establishing a product company. I finally came up with a product idea in the AI space which had been a passion of mine
Sramana: So you partnered with Informix? Manish Sharma: Yes, we partnered with Informix. They could not meet the deal requirements without us because they were a product provider, not a systems integrator. The database was a small part of the overall project. We had to submit our own credentials to win the bid. We worked
Sramana: Why would the National Stock Exchange commission ask you to build a mission critical transaction system? Did you have credentials to gain their confidence? Manish Sharma: They were not our first customer. We were able to build a good portfolio before we started working on those high profile projects. Our first customer was Indian
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Manish Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of Printo, a Bangalore, India-based company specializing in high quality printing. Manish is a serial entrepreneur who began his career in 1995 as an early member of the startup team at Rediff.com. He went on to be the co-founder of DBS Internet
Sramana: What does your management team look like today? Varun Shoor: We have four members of our senior management team. Raghav Arora is our VP of Operations. He was the first employee of Kayako and was a school mate of mine. He has helped the company grow from inception. James Edwards is based out of
Sramana: How much have you been able to accomplish with your new engineering team when it comes to maturing your product? Varun Shoor: I personally believe the product is evolving. Our engineering practices can still use additional maturing although my teams believe we have evolved to a point where we are able to really leverage
Sramana: Did your dad mentor you or help you as you were starting Kayako? Varun Shoor: I went to him for feedback but the feedback he was able to give was from a different industry. He was accustomed to dealing with factory laborers. Apart from that, he did help me when it came to managing