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 Six
years ago, this former IIT-ian saw what a lot of others
didn't - India emerging as a hub for product-led innovation.
Today, at 28, Vishal Gupta is poised to ride that wave.
Hawaii. That's where Vishal Gupta wants to be in about
two year's time. He might as well be speaking for most
of us. But the difference is that Gupta, 28, with rapidly
thinning hair and a demeanour that is still very campus-informal,
could, if he wishes to, actually spend the rest of his
life in a hammock, floating slurry alohas to passers-by
and watching the Pacific rim turn pink. "And I'll
work only if I choose to," says Gupta, who goes
on to add, with an impish twinkle in his eyes, that
"the guys at Value Chain will be pretty suspicious
if they get to read this."
In June this year, Gupta sold Herald Logic, his six-year-old
technology startup to Value Chain, an enterprise information
specialist based in Australia.
Gupta and his firm represent the quieter, less advertised
end of the Great Indian IT arc. And their significance
is better understood when you position them against
the overall IT landscape. Unlike in the west, where
the IT ecosystem evolves around product companies -
Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Oracle - in India, it has so
far been the opposite, with services firms - think Infosys,
TCS and Wipro - at the top of the heap. That is because,
say industry observers, Indian companies reckoned it
would be easier and more profitable to build services
around existing products available globally. Which meant
that we never nurtured a social and cultural environment
that aided innovation. (Another factor that played a
part was the absence of a captive domestic market; product
innovation in the Silicon Valley thrives because the
Valley itself is a captive consumer of innovation.)
But men like Gupta worked on the hunch that India would
pretty soon emerge as a consumer for technological innovation
and they were right. The country is now one of the largest
emerging markets for wireless tech, enterprise solutions
and consumer internet applications and stands on the
threshold of emerging as a major centre for product-led
innovation.
Herald Logic, born and brought up at the IIT Mumbai
incubator, was set up in 2000 when Gupta was in his
final year at the institute. The electrical engineering
student's thesis on fingerprint image analysis using
wavelets was the kernel of an idea that would soon take
the shape of an enterprise information management system,
which mixed artificial intelligence and electrical engineering
to create a technology (later branded Intellipush) that
would, for instance, in pure layman-ese, allow a tobacco
merchant to exploit a big sale of tobacco anywhere in
the world.
That summer, Gupta, who came to IIT from Dehradun, had
super job offers across the world - "our batch
had about 2.7 jobs per person" - and even a scholarship
from Cornell, but in the end he chose to see where his
idea took him. "I was a chance entrepreneur, I
probably would have been working in a semi-conductor
company in the US if it had not been for the IIT incubator,"
says Gupta, reminiscing about the bad canteen coffee,
messy rooms, sleeping bags, late-night brain-storming
and of finding a mention in the Limca Book of Records
for glugging a soft-drink in three seconds (Limca, in
fact, was his nickname at IIT).
Setting up shop in 2000 had its advantages. Money was
flush courtesy the much talked about bubble, IIT had
just started its incubator project, and if you had a
good idea, there were people ready to put money in it
(and, in hindsight, some pretty bad ones too got the
dough).
Being at the IIT incubator - the project was started
in 2000 as a support system to IIT-B students wanting
to start companies of their own - and having extremely
helpful faculty around was a major plus for Gupta, who
started off with Rs 1,00,000 borrowed from his father.
And then gloop!! The inevitable happened, the bubble
burst. If you're looking for smart one-liners about
success from this man, you've come to the wrong person.
"It was chaotic. Every VC I met for funding would
tell me to buzz off," says Gupta, "In the
end I think it was just the fact that I enjoyed doing
what I was doing that made me stay put."
 Professor
H Narayanan at IIT-B remembers that trait about Gupta
the most. "He was moderatively creative, not too
interested in scoring marks, but his persistence was
his most defining quality."
That perseverance plus the decision to go it on their
own saw Herald Logic through the downturn. "The
VCs never gave us money, which meant that we didn't
lose any and this also made us look at running the company
on internal accruals."
And even as some of its fellow incubatees came to a
standstill, by the end of its first year, Herald Logic,
still located at the IIT campus, was already making
profits. "In a way, I was lucky because we had,
with the help of IIT alumni, clients coming to us, but
it was hard, hard work all the same."
Herald Logic's Intellipush and Intelliradar, a real-time
business activity monitoring solution, is used by, among
others, Larsen & Toubro and St Gobain. In 2003,
three years after he started, Gupta moved out of the
incubator and into his own premises in Chandivali, a
North Mumbai suburb.
There was another thing that, says Gupta, helped him
be "here" rather than in the US, possibly
shovelling snow off the driveway and driving miles to
work in a highly paid, but very anonymous software job.
"That's the transition I made from being an out
and out 'engineer' type to a 'people' person. And I
had to because I was the company founder and also its
youngest employee.
"Your people are more important than all those
numbers you crunch. It may sound like a cliché,
but that's one thing I've learnt," says Gupta who
now heads Value Chain's global pre-sales and business
applications division. He's already excited by his latest
idea, which is about compressing the time it takes for
a publisher to get his product out in the market.
The rewards have been great but when you run a lean
company at 22, in tough times, a lot of life would have
probably passed you by? "Yes, I've had none of
the fun stuff that one does when you're really young
- no parties, no family get-togethers… Most of
what we earned went into the company and I lived from
one working day to the next, never took an off…you
did feel a vacuum inside."
But the former state-level swimmer says he is determined
to catch up. He got married last year, goes on treks
very often and is absolutely inaccessible on weekends.
"Six years ago, I used to work all seven days,
but today even a five-day week is a stretch," says
Gupta. Now that's a man speaking our language and the
best part is, he can afford to.
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