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STARTREK16 THE TIMES OF INDIA, CHENNAIFRIDAY, MARCH 20, 2015
‘We wanted to make a dent in the universe’
Three years ago, Ashish Goel, former COO of Amar Chitra Katha, and his techie-friend Rajiv
Srivatsa set out to make Indian homes look beautiful. Their online furniture store Urban
Ladder has won funding from VCs and Ratan Tata
Ratan Tata has made five investments in startups, Urban Ladder being one. Did he say why he was investing?
In his entire conversation, we’ll be honest, he didn’t look deeply at the business and economics of the com-pany. His main point was that we (as a company) have a role to play, which is to help the Indian customer see and appreciate good design. And he told us to be consistent about it. In fact, when we decided to do this business, we said we would do it with the aim of helping Indian homemakers make their homes beautiful. Whenever any of us travel internationally we see the homes of our friends and family, which frankly look really nice. And that’s because there is good design available.
What motivated both of you to leave comfortable corporate lives and launch a startup?
We always wanted to do some-thing on our own and create some-thing with which we could say, “we have made a dent in the universe.” Yes, we were fairly happy doing what we were doing and it’s not that we were terribly paid in the corporate world. Lots of people say, I don’t like my boss, I don’t like to be bossed around, or I want to be my own boss. That wasn’t our thing. We wanted to make a fundamental difference in a certain set of customers’ lives. It’s really the creator’s urge: can I do something fantastic.
Tell us about the challenges you face.One challenge is the constant pres-
sure to grow fast as an organization, while at the same time being able to maintain a real sharp focus on qual-ity of customer experience and prod-uct innovation. It’s a contest between innovation and growth. As a startup you can push growth for two months, even six months. But after six months if you haven’t in-novated then you’re going nowhere. Eve-ry time such a con-flict comes up you have to double the fo-cus on product innovation.
What else is important for the longev-ity of a startup?
Culture and values. Nobody seems to be talking about these basics now-adays. It’s very important that every-body understands what the values of the organization are. We have a mer-itocratic and open culture, while our values are straightforward -- honesty and transparency, customer obses-sion, and excellence in everything we do. Those values may not work for everybody and that’s fine, we don’t need everybody to work with us.
Is Urban Ladder a furniture design startup or do you view it differently?
Given our personal passion, we would have been just a design house. We would just curate; keep finding what the customer wants and find ways of getting it. We wanted to build just a technology platform and work with people who were doing a great job of design and manufacturing. And we intended to get third-party logistics players to deliver these prod-ucts. The bad news is that given how this sector has evolved, most critical parts of the ecosystem are broken -- be it delivery, manufacturing, design, brand, and trust. Currently, we have our own design team and we also manage the logistics. We contract out the manufacturing to various sellers and have set up quality teams to con-trol the quality.
The perception is that consumers go to Urban Ladder to shop piecemeal for their furniture. That doesn’t give you big orders. Is that worrying?
We started off selling small furni-ture, then we added big furniture, and now we have added decor. The even-tual objective is: we will furnish your home end-to-end. If you have bought a new home, we will give you a map
of your house and through a touch screen you will be able to put to-gether the house from a menu driven solution. Literally, in an hour,
you will be able to complete that process. And when you give us
the keys to your house, in 20 days it will be handed back to you. This plan may take us a year to 15 months to roll out.
Dr Deepu Sebin completed his MD from Stanley
Medical College in Chennai in 2012, and then co-founded DoctorSpring, a platform for overseas patients to take a second opinion from Indian doctors. But then he felt a bigger opportunity lay in developing something like a Quora for doctors that provides free clinical cases and medical content. Access to medical jour-nals like Lancet is expensive. Daily Rounds, which he started with friends Nimmi Cherian and Priyaank Choubey and which is now part of Microsoft’s accel-erator programme, enables doctors to help each other.
Shveta Raina was a graduate student at
Harvard Business School when a workshop by Nobel
laureate Muhammad Yunus inspired her to lead an ambi-
tious research project -- to fi nd a solution to India's employability
crisis. Prior to HBS, Raina had travelled to 100 colleges while working with Teach for India and saw fi rst-hand the inequity in education. She founded Talerang in Mumbai in October
2013, to make graduates work-ready. Talerang
works with 50 com-panies. "If you make an impact, you will make money," says the youngster.
PERSON OF THE WEEK
Sanjay Vijaykumar has got HDFC Bank, the largest bank in the country by market capitalization, to launch its mobile payment solution on his Chillr
platform. More banks are expected to join, and the ease of the solution for money transfers and retail payments could redefine the mobile payments business. Vijaykumar, 30, started a mobile value added services (VAS) venture, Mobme, in Kochi in 2006, immediately after completing BTech. The venture was successful, but slowed down when app stores weaned away the telecom VAS business. In 2013, the 150-people company was split into groups of 8-10, each developing separate products. Chillr is the result of one of these groups. "Mobme will now act as a mothership, with the various spaceships exploring and innovating as nimble startups that are able to raise funds from the mothership and from VCs," Vijaykumar says. He was also instrumental in establishing the Kochi Startup Village that has Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan as chief mentor.
EUREKA MOMENTS
Tanay TayalCO-FOUNDER
Ankit JainCO-FOUNDER
Kumar PuspeshCO-FOUNDER
Oliver JonesCO-FOUNDER
Moonfrog Labs Bengaluru, games app development
studio, $15 million- from Sequoia Capital and Tiger
Global Management
DONE DEALSChargeBee, Chennai, subscription billing solution for SMEs, founded by Krish Subramanian, Thiyagarajan T and K P Saravanan, $5 million - from Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management
NestAway, Bengaluru, listing of furnished houses for rent, founded by Amarendra Sahu, Jitendra Jagadev, Smruti Parida and Deepak Dhar, $1.2 million - from IDG Ventures and Naveen Tewari of InMobi
OTHERS WHO RAISED FUNDSDailyrounds ($500,000), Gorkha ($165,000), The Better India ($160,000), Fitraq ($150,000), GolfLan (NA), Qyk (NA) and Process9 (NA) DEEPU SEBIN: QUORA FOR DOCTORS SHVETA RAINA: SOCIAL IMPACT
IIT-M IS INDIA’SSTANFORD
Reeba Zachariah & Harish C Menon | TNN
One Spring evening some years ago, in a moment of alcohol-induced exuberance, two friends decided to set up a fast-food business. Fed
up of the burgers and pizzas on offer in the market, they decided their baby would sell the very Indian kathi-kabab rolls instead.
The branding was a product of former McKinsey employee Jaydeep Barman and Kallol Banerjee’s long-standing annoy-ance: “Fanatic Activism Against Sub-standard Occidental Shit”, or Faaso’s. The sundowners at Kallol’s Pune residence had hit home.
“We didn’t do any market research to zero in on a name. We didn’t want typi-cal names associated with pizzas and burg-ers,” said Barman, who, during his London years, had badly missed the desi grub. “When we opened our first restaurant in Pune, people went ‘What the hell is this?’
The name built curiosity and intrigued them,” he said.
‘Naaptol.com’ too had its genesis in fluid, though of a less potent variety. Launched by IIT Kanpur-Minnesota Uni-versity grad Manu Agarwal in 2008, the name stuck to Agarwal’s mind during a swim. “We started off as a comparison portal where consumers could ‘naap’ and ‘tol’ to decide which product to buy. Our underlying mission and vision remains unchanged -- to give consumers only win-win deals,” Agarwal said. Quirky names, often with a distinct grass-root connect, are by now well-entrenched in the Indian business scene. The trend has been pronounced in the e-commerce world. Shaadi.com, Naukri.com, Quikr.com, Myntra.com are popular examples.
The connect with the target audience is almost immediate, with recall value as bonus. Like Harish Bijoor of the epony-mous brand consultancy firm put it, in the
Strong bonds between industry and academia are critical for the emergence of a vibrant startup ecosystem. IIT Madras has taken pioneering steps that are beginning to deeply
influence startup growth and innovativeness, and others are beginning to follow its lead
If you look at some of the more prominent e-commerce and market-place ventures of today – be it Flip-kart, Snapdeal, Zomato, Quikr, Ola, or Housing – you will find that many
have founders who did engineering de-grees at IIT Delhi or IIT Mumbai.
But the future of the more technology focused startups – the kind that institu-tions like Stanford produce in droves – may actually be IIT Madras, and the phe-nomenal success of some companies like Zoho may be early evidence of that. This has to do with the culture of technology research and industry-academia interac-tion that the institution has fostered for years, and which has touched a new high with a massive research facility that was launched five years ago.
The IIT Madras Research Park was an idea conceptualized by Ashok Jhunjhun-wala, professor at the electrical engineer-ing department of IIT-M, and M S Ananth, the then dean of academic courses and later the director of the institute, to cre-ate a bridge between innovations created in the classroom and industry. It is spread across 1.2 million sq ft, houses almost 100 entities – research companies, innovation arms of large corporates, startups and incubators – and has already facilitated filing of over 60 patents.
“We realized that the rewards of R&D are significantly higher if we enable R&D personnel from industry to work jointly with our faculty and students on new ideas,” says Bhaskar Ramamurthi, direc-tor of IIT Madras and a member of the board at the Research Park.
INNOVATIVE STARTUPSThe success of the ecosystem can be seen in the quality and utility of the innova-
tions produced by its residents. Take Vor-tex Engineering, which is working to-wards financial inclusion using disrup-tive ATM technology. The company claims many firsts – first biometric ATMs for MNREGA, first ATMs to work without AC, and first commercially viable solar ATMs. Narayanakumar R, the chief de-velopment officer of Vortex, is all praise for the ecosystem. “Our research activi-ties here have resulted in almost nine patents for the cash technology used in our ATMs,” he says.
Ather Energy is building a smart elec-tric scooter at the Park. Swayambhu Bio-logics is a biotech firm that uses a pat-ented microbial composting process that results in creation of nutrient-rich bio-manure along with the advantage of man-aging distillery effluents and helping industries achieve zero discharge. IIT-M’s Rural Technology Business Incubator incubated Swayambhu in 2012 and gave them much needed resources, equipment and space at the Research Park. Uniphore, incubated at IIT-M in 2008 and which has filed six patents, has leveraged the insti-tution’s technical expertise to develop Akeira, a virtual assistant like Apple’s Siri. Akeira can be used on any basic phone and its interactive feature keeps farmers informed of advisory messages.
Startups say the presence of R&D divi-sions of large companies in the same fa-cility enables them to feed into their ex-pertise. TCS has an innovation lab at the Research Park. TCS CTO Ananth Krishnan says the engagement model, the intellectual ambience, and proximity to faculty and students have been a huge positive. “We also get an opportunity to engage and mentor startups doing inter-esting work,” he says.
The environment, though still in its nascent stages, has striking similarities
with that of Stanford, which has long had a unique and powerful relationship with Silicon Valley. A study by Stanford academics Charles Eesley and William Miller three years ago estimated that Stanford alumni and faculty members had founded 39,900 companies since the 1930s, creating 5.4 million jobs and gen-erating annual revenues of $2.7 trillion. Its students and alumni have founded companies like Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco to the more recent Google, Linke-dIn, Mozilla,Netflix, Paypal, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.
UNIQUE MODELIIT-M says it has differentiated the model to suit the Indian context. Director Ram-amurthi says the Research Park is per-haps the only one that measures the ex-tent of collaboration with clients through a "credit system". The system assigns points to clients for different joint activi-ties, ranging from joint patent develop-ment to supporting student interns. “Un-like Stanford, where the research ecosys-t e m i s f o r a c a d e m i a - i n d u s t r y linkages, while entrepreneurship devel-opment happens across the board, IIT-M’s facility has succeeded in combining research and entrepreneurial elements in one ecosystem,” says Rajan Srikanth, co-president of Keiretsu Forum, an angel investor.
Nagaraja Prakasam, mentor in resi-dence at the N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at IIM-Banga-lore, says the IIT-M Research Park ecosystem is creating ventures of high technical quality that are solving real-world problems, going beyond internet and mobile consumer ventures. Pra-kasam is an investor in Uniphore and is in talks with several other ventures for similar relationships.
Shripathi Acharya, managing partner at seed funding venture AngelPrime in Bengaluru, says he would advise startups to have a presence at the Research Park for multiple reasons -- professionalism that comes with being present in such a location, the peer learning that happens at the growth stage, and the visibility that it brings to their ventures.
The Research Park could soon get ad-ditional muscle with the IIT Alumni Club proposing an ‘IIT Alumni Industry Inter-action Centre’ at the facility. The centre hopes to help fledgling ventures in their market penetration stage. “As alumni we want to enable this interaction,” says Suresh Kalpathi, president of the Club and chairman of Kalpathi Investments.
The biggest proof that the IIT-M mod-el is working is perhaps the fact that oth-ers are now looking at replicating it. Devang Khakhar, the director of IIT Bombay, says his institution has set in motion plans for a re-search park. “We have set up a committee to get it going, land has been earmarked within the campus, and talks are on to garner sup-port from industrial stake-holders,” he says.
BROADENING ALLIANCES: Sai Praveen (L) and K R Rahul, founders of Clozerr, a platform that helps discover restaurants nearby and enables businesses track customers' loyalty points, in front of the IIT Madras Research Park
- - 18
IIT MadrasResearch Park
AREA
11.42acres
PHASE 1
0.4 million sq ft
PHASE 2
0.8million sq ft
LAUNCHED IN MARCH 2010
RESIDENTS
R&D companies
60 Incubatee companies
40Bio incubator
startups
4
Incubators
4
Startups under Rural
Technology BusinessIncubator
30Centres of
excellence and innovation centres
4
NUMBER OF PATENTSFiled Granted
63 18
CLIMBING THE LADDER: Ashish Goel (standing) and Rajiv Srivatsa
TOI
STARTUPS� Vortex Engineering� DesiCrew Solutions� Uniphore Software
Systems� Ather Energy� HyperVerge� Swaayambhu
LARGE COMPANIES� BHEL� Caterpillar
� Renault-Nissan� TCS� Cognizant� Titan Innovation� Amada
FACILITATORS� IIT-M Incubation Cell� Rural Technology
Business Incubator� Villgro� TiE
WHAT’S IN A NAME? E-LOT, THEY SAY
Source: TRACXN!
NAAMKARANStartups are
turning to quirky
names, and those with grassroot connect
e-commerce space, brand name is every-thing as there is no physicality. For instance, nobody had heard of Foodiebay.com until it was rechristened
This is unlike the brick & mortar space, Bijoor says, where you can get away with names that are not so distinctive, mean-ingful or oblique. Some look for English words and translate them like aam.com. For instance, a portal for those considering a “second marriage” goes Secondshaadi.com.
“When an enterprise is launched in In-dia, the targets are Indian customers and the Indian diaspora which appreciates Hindi. Some also opt for regional languages like a Gujarati name, which again is an at-tempt to appeal to a particular group,” Bi-joor said.
Trendy apparel retailer Chulbulstore.com, for instance, means naughty and mis-chievous in a playful way. It is a catchy, hard-to-forget name, says founder Vivek Pathak.
Companies, in their quest to be memo-rable, have in the past named brands after their founders, positive thoughts, places of origin, colours, gods and business descrip-tions. Tata Salt, Birla Cement, Bajaj Fans,
are obvious examples, besides Thums Up, Kalyani beer and Maruti.
Jessie Paul, founder of Paul Writer, a marketing advisory firm, says as long as a story can be told to connect the consumer with the name, company or product, they will remember it. As four-letter combina-tions and most meaningful English words are either already in use or have been squat-ted upon, new firms have to get creative. Indic routes are an advantage as these do-mains may still be available compared to the much higher demand for English names.
"It has become harder and harder to find words that can be registered; hence, the outburst of creativity. If you plan to address a global or even pan-India market, the best names are those that make sense in multiple languages, short and phonetic spellings,” Paul said.
“By next year, even these hatke but meaningful names would have been used up and we’ll be seeing catchy words com-bined with old favourites like ‘super’, ‘In-dia’, and ‘online’,” Paul said.
The naamkaran ritual has never been so interesting.
