Successful Startup Visionaries – The Rest is History

Among recent decades, the Noughties would sure rank high as the period that ushered in entrepreneurial revolution in the country.
Over the last 10 years, a flurry of start-ups have come into existence. They began to thrive in no time because of the innovative approaches adopted by their founders. Most importantly, they continue to flourish.
During this period, the entrepreneurial wave was sweeping across the country so heavily that Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal didn't think twice before quitting their jobs at global online retailer Amazon.com. Instead, they would go on to set up their own online bookseller firm, Flipkart.com.
The duo, which graduated from the Institute of Technology, Delhi, launched the portal with a capital of just Rs. 4 lakh in 2007.
As of now, its revenues are estimated to be about Rs. 75 crore, one of the indicators of the company's astounding growth over the last four years. No wonder it has risen to become India's largest online bookseller with over 10 million titles that are distributed from its five-city network.

In Bansals making a decision to set up an online bookselling firm, the low transaction size and lack of quality service in the niche space played a major role. The rest, as the proverbial word goes, is history.
If it was books for the Bansals, three starry-eyed young products of BITS Pilani - Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri - had something else in their minds. Thus came about the online ticket booking site RedBus.in.
Five years ago, it had the humblest of beginnings with just one bus operator. The figure has touched 700 and is growing. With presence across 15 states of India, and about 10,000 buses listed on it, the website sells around 5,000 tickets daily, which sees a sharp surge during festive occasions and holiday seasons.
According to chief executive officer, Sama, the site currently sells around 220 million tickets in a year. He puts the annual market growth at nearly 40 per cent.
All that was possible because Sama couldn't get a seat in a bus in 2005 and he thought why that was the case. The figures just prove that he has cracked the code.
SMS GupShup's growth story is as remarkable. Beerud Sheth is the man behind the mobile social network that employs group texting.
The 41-year-old Sheth strongly believes that mobile has much more reach than the Web and hence is confident about the rise of mobile-based social networking as compared to the conventional ones. His latest venture, SMS GupShup that was launched in 2007, has an estimated 45 million users in India and enjoys a $10 million revenue growth rate.
When Satya Prabhakar launched Sulekha.com, an online classifieds and yellow pages directory, at the beginning of the decade, it was a nascent segment. Now, it is one of the fastest-growing Internet companies in India.
Also, the site is evolving into a platform to offer comprehensive, integrated solutions in the digital marketplace. "There is a tremendous amount of interest in local search, and we are evolving based on customer needs. Henceforth, Sulekha.com will enable consumer-consumer commercial and B2C interaction as well as transactions. It will provide scope for advertisements, leads and sales," says Prabhakar.
It has a registered member base of about 10 million and witnesses 20 million unique visits a month. Besides its eight offices in India, Sulekha has three sales offices in New York, Austin and Toronto. The company has employed about 1000 across its offices in North America and India.
Entrepreneurship is not the bastion of only the young. The notion was proved yet again when one of the sharpest minds in the IT industry - Ashok Soota - floated his new venture. Happiest Minds, as it is named, is positioned a new-generation IT services company.
The company offers services and solutions in new, emerging technologies, such as cloud computing, social media, mobility, analytics and security.
At its launch this August, the former MindTree chairman said, "The evolving technology landscape provides opportunities and an entry strategy for new players like Happiest Minds. These new technologies enable IT to become more for transformational enterprises and measurable in terms of its business impact."
Happiest Minds, said Soota, would be differentiated by its sharp focus on these technologies, focused solutions, people brand, deep domain expertise and non-linear growth.
Last month, the company secured a $45 million Series A investment from Canaan Partners, Intel Capital, Soota and the other founders. Despite its brief existence, Happiest Minds has already gathered substantial business momentum with customer wins in the US, the UK and India.
These are just a few notable successes in the great Indian entrepreneurial journey over the last 10 years. The coming times certainly promise more for the budding entrepreneur.