Praveen Kankariya has had the satisfaction
of turning a dream into reality in a
short space of time. Today, the small-town
boy who started out with Rs 5,000 runs
two companies with offices all the way
from Indore to Silicon Valley and customers
that include Sun and Oracle.
He’s proud that his first company
Impetus Technologies is still growing
— and even more proud of the fact
that the company has still held on to
its first customer.
I WENT to school in Indore. From the
very beginning, I was attracted by creation,
planning and then building something,
watching my idea take shape. When I
was a boy, this took form in crafts
and carpentry, but as I got older, I
started to get into computers. I first
began by writing computer games, but
soon I discovered serious programming.
After college, I went to the US to
do a Masters in Computer Science. I
wanted to do something more pragmatic
than writing theoretical research papers,
even though many of my friends went
this way and became very successful.
I built a software system as part of
my masters thesis which got me hired
immediately on graduation. However,
despite this bright start, soon things
soured — my father became unwell,
and being the only son, I had to return
home.
Back in 1990, there weren’t many
options for employment in my kind of
work in Indore. Partly out of boredom,
I decided to start something myself
and singlehandedly developed a software
product.
Newspapers in those days used to churn
out press releases from around the world
on paper on big, lumbering machines.
There would be paper and ribbon jams,
the machines would run out of ink and
so on. My product tackled this by routing
64 wires into one computer. This was
the start of Impetus Technologies.
It got off to a flying start and I
had an immediate selling success ratio
of 95 per cent. I used to travel with
a little computer, sell during the day
and develop software in hotel rooms
at night. This hectic schedule went
on for about one-and-a-half years, but
I still managed to get married in the
midst of all that.
I started with no capital and no cash.
I was working with around Rs 5,000 from
my savings from the US. I had to rent
my first computer and work in my father’s
old office. But soon I was able to recruit
about eight people to work for me.
They would replicate what I did in
terms of development, leaving me more
time to market, write proposals and
so on. Profits slowly grew, we could
pay people more, and we continued to
find good talent. And people liked to
work for me — not only were we
doing cutting-edge work, our company
was small, relaxed and friendly.
However, after about two years, I got
tired. India was a difficult place to
work then. Ringing a customer in another
city could be a half hour’s ordeal;
there was no email; I had to send faxes,
and if that didn’t work, we even
used to send telegrams.
But the straw that broke the camel’s
back was my trip to Rourkela, where
I had to travel for five days, by air
and rail, for half a day’s presentation.
Fed up, I decided to go back to the
US.
I took a job with 3M in the US, and
although I no longer had any part in
the everyday running of Impetus, I was
still involved; for a while, a large
part of my salary was going on phone
bills.
Finally, I left my job and set up the
US branch in 1996. It took a few years
to understand and cater to the US market
and our first attempt didn’t quite
work out, but then we built another
company in 1998. It’s a leader
in its field, and some of our customers
include Sun Microsystems, Dell and Toshiba.
We could have sold the company in 2000
for a handsome profit, but instead we’ve
continued investing; our service corporation,
Servigistics, is still growing (we’ll
be 300 people by the end of the year);
our development centre in Indore is
still going strong.
It’s still small by most standards,
but the difference is that we’re
doing very different and cutting edge
work in software development, and our
size can even work in our favour, because
of the unique, creative environment
it inspires.
We’ve even recruited people from
senior positions at organisations like
Apple. We have come a long way from
working weekends in my father’s
office in Indore, and it looks like
we’ll go even further.