Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Help me tie these two together. The media buying that brought you the right traffic to your website, how does that translate into trust and reliability? Srish Agrawal: In order to build trust and reliability, you need a client base. Once you have that initial trust, using that initial trust that you’re able

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Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s wonderful. In fact, I would say that’s easier to do in Calcutta than in other parts of India and easier to do in other, smaller cities in India than a Bangalore or Bombay because the attitudes of people working in Bangalore, Bombay and so on is mercenary. They’re not interested in this

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Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you hire from now? In the course of the last 10 years, what has been your hiring strategy? Srish Agrawal: Either we hire from art colleges in Calcutta or we also advertise and invite people to come down to our office. We give them a piece of paper and ask them

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Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 2)

SM: What kind of price range did you have for these projects? Let’s say you did a mockup in 2002, 2003 time frame. What size project would you expect to get from that bid? SA: Normally, the projects were between $200 and $600. That was the range we were working on. $200 to $600 was

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Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 1)

The founders of Elance, Freelancer.com, and others perhaps never envisioned that one day smart, industrious, and innovative contractors would use the freelance work platforms to build million-dollar businesses. Srish Agrawal, CEO of A1 Future Technologies created accounts on Elance and Scriptlance, which was acquired by Freelancer.com in July 2012, and before long, he found himself

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Outsourcing: Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive VP and Head of Global Delivery, MPhasiS (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: And the banking and financial services focus that you’re developing, is this going to be a global focus, or is it just North America? Gopinathan Padmanabhan: It’s going to be global, absolutely global. In all regions, we are pushing for our presence in that particular space. We may not be the king of

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Outsourcing: Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive VP and Head of Global Delivery, MPhasiS (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is probably the case with all of your competitors, with the entire industry. They train internally for the core, and then they go outside for the more specialized stuff. Gopinathan Padmanabhan: That is correct. SM: We’ve covered quite a lot of ground. Is there any other area you want to

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Outsourcing: Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive VP and Head of Global Delivery, MPhasiS (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What does it cost to maintain these residential boot camps? What is the cost structure of your training? Gopinathan Padmanabhan: I don’t have an exact number. I can tell you that we provide them like a campus. SM: It sounds like it’s a fairly expensive affair, right?