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The year was mid 1997. Personally everything was going well, and professionally I was
working with Majesco Inc (US subsidiary of an Indian company Mastek) based out of Silicon
Valley, with a good salary slip at the end of the month. Those days your Green Card would
be processed within the H1B validity period of 5 years & I was in the second year of this
timeframe. Companies would start applying the green card on your behalf primarily to retain
employees for a longer period.
While this was a comfortable situation, my dream of setting up a company was constantly
gnawing at my mind space. One of the inspiring stories those days was the buy-out by
Microsoft of email service Hotmail.com from founder Sabeer Bhatia. To provide some
context of what we do not even value today, those days emails were only accessible from
within one’s company network while Hotmail allowed you to access your emails anywhere as
long as you had internet access. As you can imagine, the value of innovation was truly
highlighted by this acquisition event.
Another buzzword in the tech world those days was Y2K, and almost every company was
scrambling to get into it. In hindsight, the Y2K event allowed Indian software companies to
get a foot in the door of foreign companies all over the world. Strangely, the founders of the
company I was working with, were least interested in this opportunity. During few short
conversations I realized that their outlook was always to build products with deep tech which
had long gestation periods, and if it hits the mark there was no looking back.
It was around this time that one of the founder directors decided to open a new company in
the US to focus on building a world class product & this just hit me good. Here was a
company which was doing well (just for the record, Mastek’s turnover was greater than
Infosys at that time) but still the founders were willing to take a risk by creating a product
from scratch.
Mastek story has always been inspiring. Four founders from premium institutions in India (IIT
/ IIM) in the 80’s decided to stay in India and build a software company when many from
those institutions were going abroad; and 15 years later they were still taking a risk by
creating a new product.
With such a mind space that was already constantly occupied with starting off on my own,
events like the above (Hotmail buy-out, thought process of Founders of my own company)
started rocking my boat as though it was a sign that this was the right time to take that leap
of faith. Better not to have regrets down the road of not ever going down the path of what I
was so drawn to – entrepreneurship. And the rest as they say, is history.
About the Author
Ratnakar is a Co-Founder of Exegesis Infotech. Exegesis is India’s first Insurtech company and pioneer in Employee Health & Flex Benefits – a leading Enterprise SAAS platform that serves over 5000+ corporates, 15+ million lives and 8000+ crore annual premium.