Your Tech Story

Athulya

Being a cinephile with a love for all things outdoorsy, Athulya never misses a chance to chase inspiring stories or poke fun at things, even when the subject is herself. Currently pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, she is someone innately interested in technical and scientific research. Music reviews and op-eds define her as they allow her to explore different perspectives. Though sometimes she thinks she makes more sense playing the guitar than she does while writing.

EPAM

Teaching America how to Code: Success Story of EPAM

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EPAM Systems, Inc., better known as EPAM, is an international company offering software and IT related services. The company has a global presence with centres spread across North America, Asia, Australia and even Europe. EPAM is without a doubt one of the largest companies to emerge out of Belarus. So how did this IT giant spring from such humble backgrounds to become the world’s leading software consultation service provider? Here’s a look at what turned EPAM from just another novel idea to a thriving business.

About the Founder

Dobkin was born and brought up in Minsk, Belarus to a watchmaker father and medical assistant mother. His elder brother is an engineer, while his sister was a programmer with an innate interest in coding. Meanwhile, Dobkin attended the Byelorussian National University and graduated with an MS in electrical engineering. Shortly after college, he migrated to Russia and worked for software companies over there. Programming, Dobkin noticed always brought quick results, and so he realised that if he was going to grow, this was the field he needed to learn and explore.

He started his own programming business in 1991. By the time he was 31, he had emigrated without even knowing how to speak English with just $2000 in his account. But his dedication helped him as he learnt English on the job and he bought a car with his savings. He then got himself a job at Prudential, and he and his family stayed with his sister who was working as a programmer in the US. When his company collapsed, he contacted his childhood friend in Minsk and set up yet another software company. In the US, he continued working, switching from Colgate Palmolive to SAP Labs.

Together with his partner David Scott, he opened EPAM Systems’ first office on Emmons Drive while his daughters were in college and school respectively. As his clientele were mainly companies from the US and from Europe the financial collapse of Russia in 1998 did not affect EPAM. Slowly, yet surely, the company started to grow. Their first major client was the fashion brand Bally, which approached them looking for help building a Salesforce Automation platform for their North America-based operations.

Founding EPAM

EPAM was founded by Belarusians Arkadiy Dobkin in New Jersey, and Leo Lozner in Minsk on a partnership basis way back in 1993. His biggest struggle came in 2001, when the economic crisis hit America, rendering a major client, one who provided about 70% of his total business, went broke. The fall-out from that crisis led to a very tense and stress-ridden period wherein Dobkin had to cut salaries and acquire new clients fast. Within five years, he removed himself from the fickle field of technology and started focusing on management and operations. Dobkin recalls how his biggest challenge during the 1990s was convincing people he could be trusted, due to rising tension between the US and Russia at the time. Potential clients would be very wary regarding security issues, and winning their trust never happened overnight.

EPAM Systems

Initially, people would turn to him when they had no money to approach an American company, but EPAM would take up their work and do it well, convincing them of the company’s quality and reliability. It merged and incorporated to become EPAM Systems in 2002 and has since then grown exponentially, spreading to several continents and employing over 30,100 people. EPAM is an acronym for Effective Programming for America and is also a slogan they use for marketing promises.

Resounding Success

By 2004, the company was generating over $30.1 million in revenues, growing consistently at 1,840.8 %! The number of employees was also doubling, with the company having only 1,001 employees at that time, to its 1400 in each centre now. India’s outsourcing market overflowing, having entered the industry much earlier than others and the fact that Americans trusted Soviet Engineering all helped Dobkin mould EPAM into what it is now.

Soon EPAM roped in clients such as Reuters, Colgate-Palmolive, CareFirst BCBS, Encores, Samsung America and the London Stock Exchange. In 2004, they acquired Fathom Technology, a Hungarian software development company and this sets off an expansion plan that results in more clients in Europe. By the end of 2005, the company had over 1300 employees.

By 2008, the company acquired new clients in the form of Google and UBS and grew its workforce to over 4300 employees. In 2012, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange and was the first public offering by an Eastern European outsourcing company. In 2018, the company launched a search engine called InfoNgen 7.0, which was extremely intuitive and customizable.

Later the same year, they launched Telescope AI, which is a platform that helps run operations by using Artificial Intelligence. This year, EPAM decided to expand to even more verticals and announced that it was the lead investor for Ben Franklin Technology Partners’ blockchain venture. The company is also on the verge of opening its new office in Ukraine.

The company has continued to grow and expand and now has clients from all over the world, and enjoys a growth rate of 20%, generating over $1.15bn in revenues. The company has over 10 main offices in five countries around the world, each employing over 1400 people. It is safe to say that things are looking up for EPAM as it continues teaching America how to program!

netflix

The Urban World of Netflix: Success Story of Netflix

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There are very few internet-users who haven’t heard of Netflix. The streaming giant has grown so exponentially that it no longer needs an introduction. But long before it had become a staple tool that eats up hours of our time, Netflix was a DVD rental service that was on the verge of collapsing. So what happened? How did such a large turn of events occur? Read on to understand the highs and lows of Netflix, and how it got to where it is now.

About the Founders

Marc Bernays Randolph who was the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix is an American entrepreneur with a flair for business, having invested in various companies throughout his career. Randolph was born in New York, to Stephen Randolph, who was a nuclear engineer, and Muriel Lipchik. On his father’s side, he is related to both the legendary psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Austrian politician Edward Bernays. Randolph was a very active child and spent his summers working for the National Outdoor Leadership School. After finishing school, he went on to pursue Geology from Hamilton College, and soon after graduating took up a job at Cherry Lane Music Company.

Over in Cherry Lane, Randolph handled the mail-order operation and taught himself the basics of marketing in the process. It was while working here Randolph’s fascination with user data was born, and this would later prove to be the inspiration behind Netflix’s recommendation interface. In 1984, he founded an American chapter for the MacUser magazine and also co-founded MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse, firms that handled mail orders a couple of years later.

He later joined Borland International in 1988 as a marketer, but soon left to pick up odd jobs in Silicon Valley start-ups, such as Visioneer, and Integrity QA. Then, in 1996 Pure Atria which was a debugging company acquired Integrity QA, and that was when Randolph met Reed Hastings, who was the founder of Pure Atria. Meanwhile, Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. was born in Boston and attended the Buckingham School in Cambridge. Shortly afterwards, he joined the Marine and spent a summer at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He never completed his training, choosing instead to serve the Peace Corps.

After graduating, he joined the Peace Corps and taught in Swaziland for two years, and then returned soon after. In 1988, he graduated from Stanford University with a master’s in computer science and took up a job at Adaptive Technology. He left the company in 1991 and found his first venture Pure Software, which helped in troubleshooting other software. In 1996, the company merged with Atria Software, forming Pure Atria. It was while serving as the CEO there that he met his friend and colleague Randolph. In 1997, the company was acquired by Rational Software for a whopping $850 million.

Founding Netflix

In January 1997, when Pure Atria was on the verge of being acquired, founder Hastings planned on going back to school, while VP Randolph was looking for the next big launch. Well, as luck would have it, that next big idea turned out to be Netflix! The idea for the company was hatched on a 90-minute car ride that the duo took from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley. For six months, Randolph kept pitching ideas to Hastings, till finally one day, they hit on the idea of having a movie rental company that operated via mail. The first thing the duo did was head down to a music store, buy a CD and send it to each other.

When the pair received the CD without any damages, the pair knew that this idea could indeed work.
What followed was a mad scramble to find investors, and this was something the pair found difficult as they were rejected over a thousand times during this process. Then Blockbuster CEO John Antioco reportedly even laughed the idea off, but the duo refused to give up, and slowly Netflix grew.

The pair started the company in 1998 by using their savings and taking money from Randolph’s mother, and IntegrityQA founder, Steve Kahn. Analysis of user data helped the team build a successful subscription-based business model which still works for the company even now. They tested out an early recommendation algorithm named Cinematch, which was met with positive results. The company had only 30 employees initially and slowly grew, introducing a subscription in 1999.

By 2000, Netflix had over 300,000 subscribers but was losing money badly. This led to Blockbuster offering to buy the company for $50 million, but the duo turned down the offer. The economic crisis of 2001 would then force them to fire around one-third of their 120 people workforce, but the spring of 2002 brought good times for the company, and the business started to grow.

Streaming Giant

The company went public in 2002 and sold 5.5 million shares at US$15.00 per share. The company earned its first profit of US$6.5 million in 2003, and had by then over 35,000 films in stock, and was shipping over 1 million DVDs every day. Randolph gave up the position of CEO to Hastings in 1999 to focus more on product design and development and then left the company in 2003, a year after the company went public. Hastings proved his mettle and grew Netflix to the stage it is at now, wherein it has a market value now exceeding $130 billion.

By 2005, the company acquired movie rights and were about to go public, but decided instead to opt for a streaming channel, which went public in 2007. In 2007, Netflix delivered its billionth DVD and slowly started the move to a digital format via the internet.

2010, the company expanded further by starting a streaming media and also grew beyond America, going international and offering services in Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean. Since 2012, Netflix has started taking content production and generation seriously and has pushed out several award-winning series through its Netflix Original tag. By 2016, Netflix had expanded to over 190 countries and had already released more than 126 original series and films.

Netflix is as of now the world’s sixth-largest internet company bringing in over $15.7 billion every year, with revenue growing at 35%. From being a company that was barely surviving to the behemoth it is now, Netflix has indeed come a long way, and along with that way it has faced constant challenges. But it is in overcoming those challenges by constant evolution and adaption that the secret to Netflix’s success lies. Netflix went from being a novel and crazy-sounding idea to a movie rental company and then morphed into a streaming and production giant that churns out award-winning content month after month. With over 151 million subscribers around the world, it is safe to say that the future looks bright for Netflix.

Roku

Media for the Masses: Success Story of Roku Inc

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Roku is an American media-based company based in California and helps customers stream video and audio files from various channels all over the internet. Roku has been a revolutionary player in the field of media and has changed the way people consume media in the US. The company manufactures small devices that allow televisions to capture and play live-streamed audio and video files, thereby helping viewers use their television the way they would use the laptop or desktop. Since launching in 2002, the company has expanded its horizons and now also owns an advertisement business, and is even involved in licensing its players to external companies. Read on to find out how one entrepreneur with a vision was able to change the way people watch shows.

About the Founder

Anthony J. Wood was born in 1965 in Manchester, and lived his early years in England before moving to Georgia and then to Texas. As a child, he was always busy tinkering with stuff building transistor radios and telegraphs at a young age. He went to the Netherlands for his eighth-grade, and over there, he taught himself to code. When he got back home to Texas, he got himself TRS-80 and began programming. He was schooled in America and obtained a degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas University. It was A&M University that Wood met and fell in love with his future wife Susan, who was a student of Environmental Design at the University.

While in junior year at University, Wood founded SunRize, a company that made products for the Commodore Amiga. He had an entrepreneurial streak even back then and soon had over 14 employees, making more than $100,000. But soon enough, the company got so large that his grades started to suffer as a result. When it came to a point where Wood had to make a choice, he chose his education and hence shut the company down to finish his degree.

Fresh out of college, he launched iBand, which was a company which focused on building webpage editors. A year later, he sold the company to Macromedia $36 million and stayed on at the company as Vice President. This was the first and one of the only times Wood ever worked under someone else, and he was already 30 years old! After two years there, he left to found ReplayTV, financing the project himself before turning to angel investors.

British-born American entrepreneur and businessman is a billionaire popularly known for being the founder, and CEO of Roku, Inc. Wood worked as the CEO of ReplayTV between 1997 and 2001 and then sold that enterprise SONICblue in 2002 for over a $110 million. Later that same year, Wood founded Roku and served as the Chairman of the Board from 2008. He currently owns over 27% of Roku.

Founding Roku

Soon after selling ReplayTV, Wood focused on his new venture and founded Roku, which translates to the number six in Japanese. This was to symbolize how Roku is the sixth company founded by serial entrepreneur and investor Anthony Wood. A few years later, in 2007, Wood was given the position of VP at Netflix, with plans to build their device. When this plan fell through, a new Roku company was set-up to build the player, in Palo Alto and Netflix served as the chief investor, shelling out over $6 million for the company. The company moved their headquarters to Saratoga, later that year and announced a venture capital funding round adding another $8.4 million to their capital. By 2011, Roku’s players had streamed and downloaded more than 15 million clips and the device had over a million active users.

Media Mogul

By 2017, the company had grown to such an extent that it went public, offering the public an initial stock offering on NASDAQ. The same year, Roku acquired Dynastrom, a Danish company which makes smart speakers. 2017 also witnessed the company launch its advertising product, which allowed customers to buy ad slots for themselves on the Roku channel. This brought with it a huge shift from cable TV advertising to advertising on online streaming platforms. In 2016, Roku sought help from a media firm that focuses on targeted advertising called Magna, to extend their streaming platform to incorporate advertisements. The same year, they partnered with Nielsen which helps companies gauge their advertising effectiveness, as a means to measure the partnership’s success. Media for the Masses By 2017, the company had grown to such an extent that it went public, offering the public an initial stock offering on NASDAQ. The same year, Roku acquired Dynastrom, a Danish company which makes smart speakers. 2017 also witnessed the company launch its advertising product, which allowed customers to buy ad slots for themselves on the Roku channel. This brought with it a huge shift from cable TV advertising to advertising on online streaming platforms. In 2016, Roku sought help from a media firm that focuses on targeted advertising called Magna, to extend their streaming platform to incorporate advertisements. The same year, they partnered with Nielsen which helps companies gauge their advertising effectiveness, as a means to measure the partnership’s success.

Since debuting on the NASDAQ in 2017, the company’s shares have gone up by about 145%, meaning Wood’s stake is now worth over $1.2 billion. Their active accounts have gone up by about 46% and Roku now serves more than 22 million users, with hours of streamed content hitting rising by 58% to hit the 5.5-billion-mark last year. Helping drive this growth is their pricing, as Roku offers their device for a relatively cheap price of $30. This has helped them grow their customer-base and amass a loyal following. An easy set-up routine and intuitive user interface have been other factors that have led to their impressive growth. So much so that one in every four TVs purchased in the US came with an inbuilt Roku player.

Though Roku began its business journey as a company that manufactures devices, it now ears millions through the sale of Roku players, with the help of its partnering brands, revenue-sharing deals with over 3000 content creators and through advertisements. With even Morgan Stanley predicting that Roku will go over 40 million active users by 2020, it is safe to say that the company’s future is brighter than ever before.

Paycom

Managing your Human Resources: Success Story of Paycom

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Paycom Software better known as Paycom, is an American heavyweight that deals in HR technology, focusing on completely automatic, online payroll systems. Based in Oklahoma, Paycom was the first major company to introduce a fully online payroll system and is credited as having established all the norms companies follow regarding payroll maintenance and updating. Here’s a look at how a small idea from a young entrepreneur grew to become one of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

About the Founder

Paycom was founded by Oklahoma native Chad Richison, who did his schooling from Tuttle High School, and then went on to do his degree from the University of Oklahoma in Mass between 1989 and 1993. Richison began his career in the payroll processing industry, and left it in 1998, at the age of 27 to found Paycom. Since then, he has retained his position as the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

A native Oklahoman, Chad started out as a salesman for a payroll agency before moving into human resources management. He then shifted to Colorado to work for another payroll service provider, and finally in 1998, quit his job and moved back home to found Paycom. Working at these companies gave Richison in-depth knowledge regarding the workings of the payroll industry, and that is when he came to the realization that it was the technology that was holding the sector back.

As soon as Paycom started making money, Richison turned his attention towards charity and is a notable contributor to several Oklahoma based NGOs. In 2015, Richison gave $10 million to his alma mater’s athletics program to help them build a complex, and a year later contributed $4 million more to help with the completion of the project. He is also the founder of the Green Shoe Foundation, which helps adults face and gets over traumas they experienced as kids.

Founding Paycom

Richison’s discovery that the biggest issue that plagued the payroll industry was the lack of competent storage and sorting database, which led him to found Paycom which offered those services at a minimal cost. During the company’s early days, Richison used to go from door-to-door asking people if they wanted such a service and even made thousands of phone calls trying to acquire. Hence, initially, Richison was just as much a salesman as he was the company’s CEO. Convincing naïve clients about the potential of the internet was one of the biggest challenges he faced early on, and it was a big hurdle for a twenty-seven-year-old, as per Richison.

Paycom started out as an internet-based payroll service provider catering to businesses of all kinds and has since then expanded to several domains such as HR management and employee relations management. The company went public on April 15, 2014, under the symbol PAYC on the New York Stock Exchange. The public offering was a resounding success with the company selling 6,645,000 shares and bringing in over $64.3 million. As soon as the IPO was done, Richison invested some of his own money in the company and bought himself another 52,600 shares.

As the company grew, it started hiring a lot more employees, and by 2011 had to shift to a much larger office building in Oklahoma. The same year, they launched new services such as electronic verification systems, budget tracking, and document analysis and storage systems. By 2016, the company ran out of space again and added a whopping 90,000-square-foot extension to its headquarters. Paycom also completed the construction of a third extension in the same year, expanding the office to a mammoth size of 250,000 sq. ft.

Paving the Way

By 2018, the company had run out of office space again, and hence built a fourth extension that brought its corporate space to an enormous total of 500,000 square feet. Due to the exemplary service it provides, the company has won several awards and laurels including the Service Bureau of the Year Award and has been a constant feature in the list of Oklahoma’s best workplaces, and even came first in 2016. Deloitte too listed Paycom as one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, for the last two years.

The company’s share has also grown at the same rate and now stands at $230/share, roughly 1400 times what it started out as. Such a high share value placed Paycom at number seven on IBD’s list of fifty most important stocks on the exchange.

Today, thanks to Richinson’s initiative, the economic landscape of Oklahoma has changed to include more tech-based industries, whereas it was littered with only oil and gas industries in the past. Recently, Forbes’ magazine mentioned Paycom in its list of fastest-growing American public limited companies, and it also earned a spot for itself in the Fast Tech rankings, which looks at international companies, and grades them based on their growth.

Almost twenty years after being found, the company now makes over $500 million a year, raking in $433 million in 2017, and bringing in another $566.3 million in 2018. company is now growing at over 31% and boasts of over 23,500 clients from all over the US. With an estimated net worth at the U.S. $2.1 billion, Richison is one of Oklahoma’s seven billionaire’s and is the youngest person on that list.

jugnoo

Story of Jugnoo : The Desi Uber for Autos

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Over 5 million auto-rickshaws ply in India, and only 30% of them are properly utilized. This leads to a loss not just for the rickshaw drivers, but also for people looking for some affordable means of transportation. Jugnoo was established as a means to solve this problem by helping customers make use of affordable services for their daily needs all on a single platform. Beginning as an auto-rickshaw aggregator, the company revolutionised the way rickshaw service worked in India, and have now branched out into other fields and sectors by launching services such as Meals, Jugnoo Fresh, Menus and even Jugnoo Delivery. Here’s a look at how Jugnoo grew from being a small idea that two IITian’s had to a thriving business.

The Founders

Jugnoo was founded in November 2014 by two IIT-Delhi alumni, Samar Singla and Chinmay Agarwal. Samar always dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur and had already invested in other companies before founding Jugnoo as he hails from a business family. He tried his hand at entrepreneurship with his first venture Prodigy foods and then sold it to start Click Labs. His second outing, which he founded in 2011, with Chinmay as a partner was a profitable marketing automation software that used SaaS technology. While Samar is a physicist by his education, it is business that excites him, and that is why this serial entrepreneur decided to take a risk again with Jugnoo.

Chinmay Agarwal who serves as the Chief Operations Officer at Jugnoo has a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi. Following his graduation, he won the Erasmus Mundus scholarship, and so went on to do his Joint Masters in Advanced Robotics from Ecole, France and the University of Genoa in Italy. He later switched to business, embarking on his first venture, Click Labs with Samar, where he held the position of Chief Technical Officer. At Jugnoo, he wears multiple hats, helping Samar with both the operations and product side of things.

Founding Jugnoo

Jugnoo founders
Image Source: homebusinessmag.com

In 2014, while at Chandigarh, the duo launched Jugnoo at PECFEST and gave people free rides as a part of their marketing strategy. The idea caught on, and soon the pair realised that there was untapped potential in this sector. Samar and Chinmay then began connecting drivers and customers, and soon enough Jugnoo took shape.

One of the toughest challenges they faced initially was getting the rickshaw drivers familiar with the technology they employed. This introduction wasn’t always smooth, as the drivers came from an environment wherein technology wasn’t so well integrated. Hence, it took a lot of time, effort and dedication to explain the process to them, how the layout works, and how it would help them. Convincing the drivers that such a platform would be beneficial to them wasn’t an easy task, because these weren’t people who liked the idea of change. But, the duo persisted, and soon enough, people started seeing the application as a boon that would help improve their accessibility, and that was when the company started taking off.

Leading the Way

Soon enough, Jugnoo started earning a name for itself, and the first big investment came in the form of seed funding, when the company raised USD 1 million through investors such as Junglee Flywheel, BCG Group, Rapportive, and Kirloskar Bros. It followed this up with a Series A funding and was able to raise another USD 5 million. Furthermore, recently they embarked on a Series B funding round which raked in an additional USD 10 million with their main investors being big players such as Paytm and Snow Leopard ventures.

Within the first seven months, Jugnoo had amassed over 80,000 users and was completing over 1,500 transactions a day. They earned 80% of their total revenue from auto-rickshaw deliveries and bookings and was making more than $1,500 a day.

By 2016, Jugnoo had evolved and had branched into various verticals, growing into an end-to-end solution for their customers. The app has continued to grow at over 20% a month and boasts over 5 million registered users and an auto-rickshaw fleet that is 12,000 drivers strong. Jugnoo recently added the facility of UPI payment on their app as a means to promote a cashless economy that the government is pushing. They have also launched products in the B2B market, including the likes of Tookan and Juggernaut.

Unlike other start-ups that rush towards the metros once established, Jugnoo prefers to stay in Tier-II and Tier-III cities, because 80% of India’s population resides in such cities. Today, the company is rapidly growing and employs over 1000 people, across 35 cities and successfully completes more than 50,000 transactions a day. Jugnoo does more than making money for its founders. Rather, it has a social side to it as well, as it helps people get access to affordable transportation, while also uplifting the lives of millions who depend on menial jobs for their survival.

The Smart Taxi

The Smart Taxi : India’s Premium Cab Service; ‘Travel in Style’

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There are so many companies and brands out there that businesses are forced to gain a client’s approval to provide them with their services. Since they have a wide variety of options, customers have the freedom to choose a company that best suit their needs and requirements. Gone are the days of absolute brand loyalty wherein a whole household would use one product, and one product alone. The future is about giving the clients what they need and also being courteous and polite while doing so, to improve customer experience. Delivering unique and pleasant customer experiences will help in retaining clients, and none understand this better than the new-age start-up The Smart Taxi. Here’s a look at how an ordinary middle-class man dared to dream and made his dream into a reality.

About the Founder

Dhruvam Thaker was born in Jamnagar, and shortly after his birth, his family shifted to Ahmedabad. While growing up, Dhruvam was a quiet, and an introvert boy who had a knack for mechanics and solving riddles. Being shy and apprehensive, he preferred the company of his cars and toys over other people. It was cricket that finally helped the shy Dhruvam make friends and get over his fear of interacting with people. His father is a retired government bank employee, while his mother is a housewife. He has two siblings, a brother and a sister, who have hearing and speaking disabilities.

Due to financial constraints on the home front, Dhruvam studied in a Gujarathi medium school till class 9. His interest in science led him to take up science in his 11th, and he aspired to become an engineer. The first setback he faced in life was failing his 12th-grade exams. He, therefore, used his 10th-grade results to join a diploma course in Nirma University, determined to get his life back on track.

The Smart Taxi Founder
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As his love for automobiles and machines grew, so did his grades, to an extent where he came in second in his University exams. While in college, Dhruvam worked part-time jobs and did several odd jobs to make ends meet and to ease the financial strain on his family. Soon after, he got placed and joined an MNC in Bengaluru in 2008 and worked in process improvements and production engineering. In 2013, he came back to Ahemdabad and joined a job near his home. Apart from his job, Dhruvam started feeling the need to do something of his own. While this thought was always in the back of his mind, pressure from society and financial constraints prevented him from taking the leap of faith. But one day, he made his mind and quit his job without letting anyone know about it.

Founding The Smart Taxi

While working in Bengaluru, it required him to travel using taxis, and he often found taxi services to be lacking, when it came to customer experience. He realised that issues such as poor car maintenance, rude staff behaviour and late pickups plagued the taxi service industry, while he found the airline and hotel industry to be the opposite.

That is when he came up with the idea for a taxi service that provided the same hospitality extended by airlines and hotels all over the country. The idea stayed with him all the while as he moved to Ahmedabad and started his new job there. Finally, after four years of running the idea through his head, he decided to quit his job and make his idea a reality. Dhruvam chose Ahmedabad to be his company’s headquarters as he had a local advantage and knew the market there well. So, in September 2016, Dhruvam finally gave life to his long-standing idea of a luxury taxi service, and The Smart Taxi was born. He, and his brother, who is a graphic designer, quickly got to work, and created over 22 test logos, before finally choosing on their present logo.

Speeding Forward

The Smart Taxi now has a fleet of well-maintained cabs, which have all the state of the art features and installations. The taxis themselves are driven by courteous, experienced, polite and well-trained professionals. There is an elite group of people in India who don’t mind paying extra for premium service, and that is exactly what The Smart Taxi provides; exemplary service and outstanding customer experience. The Smart Taxi has several plans and offers, and rents cabs for both hourly trips and longer outstation journeys. Their cabs welcome clients with crafty speeches, play soothing music in the taxi to create a positive ambience, and even offer customers everything from water bottles to chocolates and snacks! Some of their taxis even have WiFi, cold drinks, a plethora of magazines and an Amazon Kindle to help the customer relax and enjoy their favourite book or novel.

The Smart Taxi began its journey with just one cab that Dhruvam used to drive. Since then, the company has grown and now owns a fleet of over 60 cars, including comfortable Sedans and powerful MUVs. The company has now expanded and functions in seven cities; namely, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot, Jaipur, Pune, Indore, and Bhopal, with plans to expand even further. As the company is a bootstrapped startup, they make use of online platforms, like Google and Whatsapp to run their operations. The company also has a centralized booking centre from where they delegate bookings to local taxi companies or fleet owners. At present, the booking happens only online, but Dhruvam has plans to extend this functionality to other platforms in the near future.

Dhruvam remembers how during the initial days, he ran the entire company, doing everything from driving cabs to attending calls. But throughout his struggle, he never gave up, but rather kept pushing forward hoping that things will work out eventually. And work out it did, as within two years, the company has grown in every way with two out of every three customers coming back to them and 3 out of 4 even providing them with referrals. While a long road lies ahead for Dhruvam, it is safe to say that this shy, introverted mechanical engineer will surely leave his mark in the field of taxi service!