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Quick Heal Technologies: From earning $12 per month to billion dollar antivirus company

start-up, Tech Story / By Aanchal Awasthi

Stories of great achievers are always very enchanting, yet they are true and no fairy tales. Anyone with required skills, dedication, hard work, patience and never say die attitude can strive for the success.

Kailash Katkar, MD and CEO of Quick Heal Technologies Limited, never waited for success to find him, rather made all possible efforts to reach out to it. He did not belong to a rich family, did not have luxuries to lead a comfortable life yet he is at a position now where he can enjoy every comfort of life. But all this did not come to him in legacy; it is the fruit of his hard work and talent. And in his journey to the desired destination, his younger brother Sanjay Katkar accompanied him as a reliable support.

Early life & hard work
Katkar belongs to a very modest Maharashtrian family, born in a small village at Rahimatpur, India. Since, the village was too small to support them with future prospects, they moved to Pune where his father worked as a machine setter in Philips. With a handful amount of family income, it was getting tough to manage all the requirements and this made Katkar take up a job right after his graduation. He worked as a mechanic at a local calculator and radio repair shop and managed to add $12 (INR. 400) to the family income kitty. But stagnation was something not made for Katkar. Following his interest in technical field, he learned to repair gadgets popularly used in offices in those days which included desktop electric calculators, radios, TVs, ledger posting machines and so on. From this side business, he could successfully earn $65 (INR 2000) a month which was undoubtedly an achievement for him then. But this achievement did not make him happy enough to stop. His dreams were not of walking on roads but to fly in the sky. Pursuing the same he set up his own hardware repair shop, whose success gave him a comfortable living.

Entry into the entrepreneur world
A comfortable life never tempted Kailash Katkar so much as to settle down. His first step into the entrepreneur world could be marked by the opening of his own shop with an initial investment of around $200 (Rs. 15,000) which was a big deal two decades back. The first year of this one-man venture gave him an income of $1100 (INR 45,000) which was quite decent but not enough to satisfy Katkar. He began feeling an incompetency in his skills and therefore went on to attend short computer courses around 1991-92 so as to look forward to a better venture and earn more and more. He set a second milestone in his way to be a successful entrepreneur by establishing a new business of computer services, keeping up the repair shop running at the same time. In 1993 he won the annual maintenance contract for New India Insurance, leaving all the well-established corporate ventures far behind. This success shows the amount of dedication this man gave to his work which led him to generate a turnover of $2300 (INR. 100,000).

During this time, popularity of computers in India began expanding and at the same time many virus related problems were also observed. This is when Kailash Katkar and his brother Sanjay Katkar got the idea of developing antivirus software to relieve people of such issues with their systems. Going along with the flow of their business, they appointed some software engineers later and with the immense efforts of each member they developed a better version of antivirus software.

Rebounded from the verge of shutdown
Promotion and marketing of Quick Heal remained limited to Pune area only for many years. Katkar brothers were finding it hard to manage a office in Pune in the absence of outside investment. It was then in 1999 when they decided to shut down the antivirus business.

However, on the suggestions of few friends they decided to give it a last shot with aggressive marketing. They started with half page ad in Times of India. Happy with their success they went on to open various branches of their setup in different parts of the country and by the year 2005-2006, they expanded the cause focusing on computer speed, mobile security and gateway level protection. They then, renamed their company to Quick Heal Technologies in 2007 which is counted among one of the popular companies in this field. In 2010, Quick Heal received an investment of $13 million (INR 60 Crores) from Sequoia Capital with another round of funding of $19.7 million from anchor investors, including BNP Paribas Advantage and Reliance Mutual Fund later.

This funding helped Katkar open sales offices in countries like Japan and the US. Today, Quick Heal Technologies have tie ups with several countries across the globe and its achievement is surely not unheard. It has grown to 31 branch offices with over 8 million customers worldwide.

Aanchal Awasthi

Aanchal is a freelance writer and has been writing since 2013. She is currently pursuing her masters in English Literature from University of Delhi and received her B.A. (hons.) degree in English Literature from University of Delhi.

She has a great passion for writing poetry. She is also a keen reader of inspirational stories of people who have achieved success through hard work.

From Rags to Riches: Journey of Jyothi Reddy from a farmer to the CEO of a $15 million IT firm

start-up, Tech Story / By Aanchal Awasthi

Everybody dreams of being a millionaire, but have you ever thought why everyone doesn’t become rich? We shall not impose all blame on luck, yes indeed, good fate is a necessary aspect to achieve success but relying completely on it isn’t justifiable. Persistent efforts, patience, hard work, determination and a good intention are equally important to get what you want. And we do have examples of those who started from zero but reached the zenith of success.

“I could not stand being poor. I was born poor and was wed into another poor family.”

These are the words of Jyothi Reddy, CEO of a $15 million US based IT company, Key Software Solutions. The story of Jyothi Reddy is about her extraordinary journey from a poverty ridden life to that of utmost luxury. She has set an example for all those women who have the potential to ascend the ladder of success but belonging to a weak economic background leaves them hopeless. There is nothing impossible in this world and one should never make any compromise with one’s dreams as you never know when time changes and transforms your life.

Constant struggle turning out to be fruitful

Jyothi Reddy, being from an extremely poor family from India had to become a forced orphan for 5 years where she attended a government school from class 5 to 10. After 5 years living in the orphanage, she determined to live a better life but leaving the orphanage proved no better for her as she was married off at the age of 16 to an impoverished farmer 10 years older to her. Poor economic condition did not leave her side and her life grew even worse. As a result of dearth of money, she too was compelled to toil as a farm laborer earning a meager amount of Rs.5 per day and this continued from 1985 to 1990.

Meanwhile she became the mother of two daughters and this gave her the strength to fight for herself and for her daughters. By her sheer efforts, she grabbed the opportunity of teaching in a government school. But the money she earned from teaching was not sufficient to run her family of 4. Therefore, she constantly looked for other small works like stitching petticoats, selling one or the other things on buses and trains. But Reddy never lost hopes and she never turned back but prepared herself to fly victoriously. As she knew the importance of education, she graduated herself from Ambedkar Open University and also learned typewriting.

Prepared the way to America all by herself

Her first step to enter into the techno world could be marked by her meeting with a US cousin who inspired her to escape the situation of poverty by going to the US. The cousin too saw a spark in her to strive for her set goal. Reddy then drove herself to take computer science classes with great dedication. And after all needed arrangements were made; she made it to US alone. Reaching US did not make her problems go away, tussle for success didn’t end there but a new struggle awaited her. Her initial days there were of great struggle as she was not fluent in English and also had no big degree but again she not for a moment dwindled. She worked as baby-sitter, load/unload goods and many such places there. She also worked as a software recruiter in Virginia, from where she learned all about techno world and got much useful experience.

Beginning of entrepreneurial journey

Her ambitions never let her remain satisfied and this is the reason that she is standing at the pedestal of success today. Her job as a recruiter weaved her dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. She returned back from US only to determine herself to open her own software company in US. She set up an office at Phoenix in 2011 with an investment of her savings of $40,000 and since then she is running her company, Keys Software Solutions.

Today Jyothi Reddy is a known social activist and philanthropist working for the upliftment of orphans.

Aanchal Awasthi

She has a great passion for writing poetry. She is also a keen reader of inspirational stories of people who have achieved success through hard work.

CEO who once struggled to speak English now commands $3 Billion Company

start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Team YTS

Being not able to speak or being fluent in English, a global business language that binds billions of people will certainly lower your confidence and may become a source of humiliation at the work place and business meetings. You might consider this shortcoming as your biggest weakness to professional growth.

However, some dare to defy the set standards of society & business world. Those who have the dream to do something bigger in life, keep their head down, face the challenges with courage and keep working towards the bigger dream.

One such person is Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of PayTM, a $3 billion e-commerce and payments company from India.

Winners do things differently
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was born in the city of Aligarh (UP), India to a humble family. With no bigger life goal than to complete his engineering degree and land up in a job and serve his family, he left Aligarh after completing his schooling to pursue an engineering degree at Delhi College of Engineering.

Vijay entered the Delhi College of Engineering with great enthusiasm and zeal at the age of 15. Vijay who had studied all his life in Hindi medium wasn’t able to understand a word in classroom where lectures were delivered only in English. Even his classmates preferred English to converse. Vijay shifted to back benches to avoid attention and even started to bunk lectures. This was testing time for him but then Vijay decided to take this thing head on and win the battle. He started to read English magazines & dictionaries borrowed from others.

He read lot of English business magazines during his college time. This arouse his curiosity about internet and software.

Entrepreneurship is bed of thorns
Inspired from Yahoo and Sabeer Bhatia, Vijay launched a company named Xs while in college. He along with his batch mates built a website that had web directories, web-guided services and a search engine. Vijay also got seed money from a Angel Investor, a New Mexico-based venture capital fund. Vijay sold the company in 1999 to Living Media India (India Today Group) for half a million dollars. Vijay bought his first color TV with the money and also paid of his father’s loan.

From One97 to PayTM
Vijay co-founded One97 with Rajiv Shukla, a mobile VAS company in 2000. But in 2001 company got hit by post 9/11 market crises. His partner left and Vijay was left with no money. He was forced to travel in buses and even on foot to save money for dinner & tea. He had to take a job amid family pressure to get settled in life. After few months Vijay left the job to get back to entrepreneurship.

Vijay continued with One97 and lunched services like mobile astronomy, music messaging, ringtones etc. and got series A and series B funding.

In 2010, Vijay launched PayTM, an online mobile recharge platform. Vijay in 2011 coined the idea of mobile payments to company board but board wasn’t convinced. But, a confident Vijay offered to put in $2 million of his own equity to launch PayTM. RBI’s approval of semi closed wallet in 2012-13 paved the way for the launch PayTM payment wallet and marketplace. In 2014-15 PayTM secured a funding to the tune $100 million in series A from Alibaba, Alipay and SAIF.

PayTM is now doing an average transactions worth Rupees 30 million on daily basis and is backed by industry legends like Ratan Tata. It has a network of 16,000 online and 10,000 offline registered merchants and is projected to increase to 100,000 merchants. Currently, PayTM is valued at $ 3 billion after the latest funding round of $680 million from Ant Financial of Alibaba. Recently PayTM has launched in-store payments from wallet as well.

With the personal experience of hard achieved success, Vijay refrains to call the staff at his office as employees, he prefers to call them as colleagues or teammates understanding their contribution also towards growth of the company. He also distributed 4% of his equity worth $120 million to his team.

The meteoric success came to Vijay with all his own hard work and sheer determination. Rise of a man with humble background against all odds and hurdles like language, early debacle of business and a reluctant board at One97, he stands as an inspiration and attestation behind the saying “A man makes his own destiny”.

“To the winners, who won because they didn’t give up.”- Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Team YTS

Multi-million dollar start up that just works 4 days a week without any managers

start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Team YTS

Today when most startups tend to burn the mid night oil and work even on weekends, this organization works typically for 4 days a week (Mon-Thu), more specifically 32 hours a week and has grown exponentially from a start up to become a leading global multi million dollar Ed-tech company offering online professional training & courses. The organization is Treehouse, headquartered in Portland, Ontario. Employing 110 employees, Treehouse operates just 32 hours in a week.

The secret recipe to rousing success

How come a company working less than 32 hours a week with around 100 employees is so successful. The reason for this is amazing work culture of Treehouse.

No Managers

Treehouse is a flat organization with no manager controlling employees or their work. Each employee is responsible for their own work. Earlier Treehouse was also like any other company having typical org structure. Internal politics, grapevine and rumors were hampering its growth cycle. It’s then company decided to do away with org structure and have a flat hierarchy. Going flat has increased the productivity of the Treehouse staff and enabled them focus on the activities they are hired for. The flat organization enabled the employees to implement their own ideas in the work they were assigned instead of depending on the typical managerial hierarchy to work on it.

The career growth of the individual employee in the company in absence of the managers is set up on the basis of how proficiently a employee delivers the work assigned. Breaks are encouraged during the working hours to have personal communication between colleagues. The employees work from Monday to Thursday and the offices are kept closed on Fridays and weekends, thus enabling them to spend more time with their families.

This work culture has helped create a complete work life balance and almost 100% retention of the workforce.

Less emails more productivity

Employees are discouraged from using emails. Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse says that emails distract employee and instead they use HipChat which keeps them focused on their work schedule.

For the discussion on the ongoing projects Convoy, an internal discussion forum is used. These tools have increased employee productivity since they don’t have to go through each and every email. Treehouse discourages any sort of official communication on off days that is on Fridays and weekends.

Less meetings, less interrupts

Treehouse team believes in less face to face meetings. Most of the communication is written either on Convoy or HipChat which reduces unplanned meetings or interrupts. Employees can plan their work and also choose to respond to written communication as per their schedule and availability.

All these things have resulted in increased productivity, less attrition, high employee morale. Treehouse in the year 2012 received initial funding of 4.75 USD and one year later in 2013 received 7 million USD funding from Social+Capital and Kaplan Ventures. It has been able to garner a monthly revenue of $1.7 Million with a subscriber base of more than 1,00,000 and recurring monthly sales of $1,42,000. The number of its paid subscribers is increasing by an average of 46%.

Today, Treehouse provides technical, skill enhancement, app development and other learning tools via iOS and android apps at affordable rates both to the individuals as well as organizations and learning institutes like schools at affordable rates. It offers choice of the subject from its extensive library and has a point based system within the apps that measure the progress of the skills learned by its subscribers.

Team YTS

Farhan Masood- A college dropout to multi-billion dollar bio-metrics startup

Inspiration, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Anshu Verma

Asia is now becoming a hub for innovative startups that dare to dream and innovate big time. One such startup is SoloInsight, a Pakistani startup that has built fastest 3D facial and iris recognition algorithms. SoloInsight is founded by Farhan Masood. Farhan is a well known entrepreneur and inventor.

Farhan the founder and CTO of biometrics security startup SoloInsight dropped out of college at the age of nineteen and is a self-taught technology inventor since then. He has received 34 international and 5 local awards. He started his journey from zero and today his company is operational in seven different countries and has a worth over 10 million dollars.

Hard work, commitment & perseverance
Masood was lucky enough to get his hands on gadgets and technology at a very early age. He got fascinated about computer software and engineering, but could not afford to buy the technology books. But he had a thirst for knowledge and curiosity about how things work. So, he made friends with a shopkeeper who would allow him to spend hours in his book store. He would bunk classes and read about computing at the bookstore all day long.

Thirty-five-year-old Pakistani national Farhan Masood got the attention of media and people when he developed Urdu graphics and the Persian language script for the Internet. He was just 19 then. This success gave him enough reasons to drop out of the college and pursue his dream.

His global recognition and interviews in national and international media landed him on an advisory position with Pakistan Govt. During his job, he helped government translate and digitize land records, which were previously only stored in old style, physical files. Later he moved to Dubai to start his own firm (an advertising technology startup called Quick Fix Solutions) and worked on several projects, including websites for the Dubai e-government, Enoc, Eppco and Dubai Internet City.

Birth of SoloInsight, a patented technology
After watching watching the Tom Cruise movie ‘Minority Report’ (based on future technology), Masood decided to work on iris recognition technology. In 2010 Masood moved back to Pakistan to work on SoloInsight.

SoloInsight is a global recognition software platform that helps companies accurately and efficiently manage ingress and egress to increase safety, ensure compliance, and save money. SoloInsight using its patented technology helps businesses increase productivity & profits.

For past 10 years, SoloInsight is tapping a billion dollar biometric devices market. SoloInsight has 119 clients and 114000 daily users. SoloInsight counts companies like US Apparel, Nestle, Pepsico, PEL, and the Pakistan Army as clients.

The journey
Masood wasn’t born with a silver spoon, he worked hard all his life to live his dream and make Pakistan proud. It was his father who encouraged and developed his interest in computing.

His continuous achievements and enthusiasm has made him an inspiration for many young entrepreneurs. His journey wasn’t that easy after all. For once he thought that his dream was shattered, when he needed money for his startup and his visa application was rejected due to political events. He has now moved his business to America and made a big name across the globe.

Farhan’s focus now is to transition into “Internet of People”, an unexplored idea. Other than being a recognized technologist and innovator, Farhan is well known for his philanthropic activities. The entrepreneur was awarded a Global Innovation through Science and Technology competition award by US Vice President Joe Biden in Turkey, for running the country’s largest blood donation network called Bloodline. Farhan Masood runs a movement called Pakistan Go-Green, which was the subject of a Digital Revolution case study at the Cambridge University.

Anshu Verma

Anshu Verm is a software developer by education and blogger by passion.You can call her Tech Savvy!!

Apart from blogging, she is a music lover and love to sing! She don’t consider herself an expert and love to learn new things everyday.

She swear by the YOLO philosophy and believe that everyday may not be good, but there’s something good in everyday!!

She is a big fan of technology and loves to write about tech founders, startups and technologies.

Alok Kejriwal- From making socks to leading online game company

India, Inspiration, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Anshu Verma

The thinker + Doer = Rodinhood says his Quora profile; Alok Kejriwal is the man who changed the pace of India’s online gaming industry. Rodinhood is inspired from Rodin – who sculpted ‘The Thinker’ and Robin Hood who ‘got things done’.

Born on 25th December, 1968, the renowned CEO and co-founder of Games2win is known to the world as Rodinhood. Alok Kejriwal is an entrepreneur who knows how to utilize a problem as an opportunity to build business around it. He started his journey by joining his family business of socks manufacturing at the age of 18, while he was still in college. After 10 years, he moved out of the family business and started something of his own which was not into manufacturing. He went on to venture in mobile and then online games.

Making of the Rodinhood

As they say, leader is one who knows the way, shows the way and goes the way. Alok Kejriwal is a true leader and has proved his leadership, honesty and truthfulness in every walk of life. He started his socks business around 1989. Once when his socks factory was preparing Argyle socks order for a leading retailer he noticed an issue with packaging. He picked up one bundle of socks and opened it like a consumer for final inspection. As he ripped the adhesive sticker from the socks, he was thunderstruck as the thread of the small ‘criss cross’ lines that make the Argyle pattern so famous began ripping out of the socks. The shipment was ready to be shipped in 3 hours and the socks had PASSED inspection from Europe and India. Without worrying about extra cost of building top pair of socks and losing credibility or business he decided to be truthful and informed the buyer. This critical decision earned him a lot of respect in the eyes of buyer. The buyer was so delighted and grateful that he not only paid for extra cost but also gave many more orders in future.

In 1998, Kejriwal founded an online contests portal company named Contests2win.com (C2W) with a borrowed laptop and only Rs 5,000. He realized the power of internet while working in the family business. During this time, he used the internet for information on spare parts on company websites. “I got fascinated with the power of Internet to distribute knowledge and thought of building business around it.”, Alok once said.

Later, he launched a venture entitled “Mobile2win” in china in 2001. Mobile2Win organized mobile competitions and promotions on mobile interactive platforms. In 2003 mobile2win operations were also started in India. He got the VAS Business of Sony Channels’ singing show Indian Idol. Alok was one of the pioneers of ringtone business. He did create a lot of value and money before mobile companies and tv channels themselves started doing this business to maximize their profits.

Mobile2win was doing fantastic but due to funding, scale and other issues, Alok was asked to leave mobile2win. However, this sad exit turned out to be good for him in long turn. He got million dollars on exit from mobile2win which he invested in conetst2win. Later the Indian arm of mobile2win went to Chandigarh (India) based company for no cash deal while Chinese mobile2win got acquired by Disney.

Taking the legacy forward, he came up with a new venture Games2win in the year 2007. Today, Games2win is ranked among top gaming site across the world. The most popular game at Games2win is Parking Frenzy and has about 20-25 million downloads. Besides Parking Frenzy, another 15 of their games have 1 million downloads now.

As the popularity increased, Games2win discovered that thousands of other websites and blogs were embedding Games2win games on their sites. Instead of blocking games on other websites or sending them copyright infringement notices, Alok and his team used an innovative idea. They started displaying Ads within the game whenever it was played on a website other than Games2win. Suddenly their success metric changed to the number of websites illegally embedding their games. More the embeds, more display ads, more revenue.

Although not being a great supporter of mobile only approach, he moved Games2win from a top game company to a mobile games company while struggling with static traffic in 2010. Games2win started focusing on mobile games and stopped making web games in 2014. New games are only available for smartphones. However, you can still play old games on their website.

Tough calls and work life balance

Entrepreneurship is bed of thorns. Being a successful entrepreneur and a successful father, husband at the same time is not that easy. You are always occupied with business deals, meetings, and dinner with clients and what not. Alok Kejriwal is married to Chhavi Kejriwal and has two daughters. In his blog “would you marry an entrepreneur? “, he jotted the pros and cons of marrying an entrepreneur. Topping it with his own story, he recalled a real life incident.

Can you imagine where was he when his second daughter was born? Hospital? No, you got it wrong! Well he wrote,” I skipped visiting the hospital and escorting my wife and my newborn daughter (my second child) home, because that evening I was signing some term sheets of my first venture contests2win.com in the lobby of The Oberoi in Mumbai.”

Startup mentor, critic and attention grabber

Alok never shies from going public with his views on different startups and their business ideas and many times he has been proved right. Alok criticized the app only approach of Myntra and Flipkart which turned out to be true after these companies rolled back their decision.

The the blue eyed gaming champ also criticized then Housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav for two Housing.com hoardings that were barely visible behind trees which attracted a sharp reaction form Rahul Yadav.

Amidst all the criticism, chaos and challenges, Alok kept pushing himself and continued to grow as an entrepreneur. He knows the art of being in news and use the right opportunity at right point of time.

Alok belongs to that rare breed of successful entrepreneurs who go extra mile to help budding entrepreneurs achieve success. This “Crazy Internet Entrepreneur” of India is playing the role of a startup mentor and motivator. Alok runs Rodinhood.com where he and fellow Rodinhoods share their experiences related to startups, products, teams, marketing & business. Nothing can beat such startup stories and experiences in helping budding entrepreneurs run their show successfully. He and his team of volunteers organize The Rodinhoods Open House(TRH) in different cities of the country for free. TRH helps startups meet industry leaders, pitch their product to investors and network with fellow entrepreneurs.

His favorite advice to entrepreneurs is

“To go where no man has gone before…” (from Star Trek).