Things Ravi Pratap Is Up To

I’ve never been one to mark each passing year of my life with a loud celebration, but today, being the day I complete 3 decades, I feel the urge to draw some attention to the significant milestone that it is in my life.

A lot of people have been calling me through the day and some of them have asked me how it feels to be 30. Although I had earlier expected to worry more about the piling on of years, I’m quite happy to report that I’m feeling quite the opposite – a sense of contentment.

Priya, my sister-in-law, asked me when she called to wish about what I thought about being 30 the “top of the hill”. I told her that I thought of 30 being really half-way up the hill. Everything that I dream about and hope to accomplish in the future is really going to happen over the next 30 years so if you think of 60 being Mt. Everest, I’m probably still at base camp!

There’s this moment from 8th grade history class that I remember very distinctly. We were learning about Chinese history and famous philosophers like Confucius and Lao-Tzu. I came across this quote by Confucius that has stuck in my mind ever since:

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life

From teaching myself computers and programming in the 5th grade, learning Carnatic singing, training in long-distance swimming, playing tournament-level chess, studying for the IIT exam, contributing to open source projects, singing in a rock band, leaving Morgan Stanley to join Hillcrest, driving a BMW, to giving it all up and striking it out on my own, all I’ve ever done is follow my heart and do what I truly love.

So when Sharat, my cofounder and one of my dearest friends, asked me if I had any unfulfilled desires or regrets, it really got me thinking. And after thinking about it for nearly the entire day I realized that I had no answer for him.

I’ve actually done every single thing that I had wanted to do by 30. And I’m married to the woman of my dreams.

What else could I ask for?

It’s been about 3 months since Vidya and I landed in Bangalore’s shiny new airport. I remember being welcomed by Bangalore’s cool air, and feeling a great sense of optimism about the life that lay ahead of me. That Thursday morning, the 14th of May, was the start of a new life in a city that was unfamiliar and strange in a way, yet warm, forthcoming and very familiar other ways. I suppose it was not very different from how I felt when I landed in St. Louis on the 20th of January, 2002. In an unfamiliar country all set to start a new life, I was beside myself with excitement at the novelty of the life I was about to experience. Seven and a half years later, in Bangalore, I’m getting started again.

I think it can safely be said that in the months I’ve lived here, I am now as much a feature of 6th Main, Indiranagar 2nd Stage, as the local chai shop, the security guards blowing their noisy whistles as cars whiz in and out of basement car parks, and the stray dogs that congregate in front of our apartment building every night and howl like their ancestors I live at one end of 6th Main and work at the other end. One end of it is secluded, with apartment buildings that house the urban rich and as prosaic in their design as they usually are in most urban parts of India. At the other end of 6th Main is a busy, noisy street, what they call Indiranagar Double Road and at that intersection lives my cofounder and partner in crime, Sharat. Every morning, I make my way from one end of 6th Main to the other, without being run over by honking cars, passing a cow or two on the way, sometimes a vegetable or fruit cart, before showing up at our office, which we currently run out of Sharat’s apartment.

As bootstrapping entrepreneurs, Sharat and I work out of a one-room office which serves as everything that you’d imagine we need – conference room, cubicle room, server room, war room, you name it. Out of this office we work to build our company one day at a time.

Sometimes I think about how far we’ve come from that day in October when I first had the conversation with Sharat about working together on a little idea that just may be something we could make a company out of. With me in DC and Sharat in Bangalore, and with Skype to help us out, we started putting together what we called an investor “teaser” presentation.

It took us nearly 6 weeks before we had a first working draft of our 6-slide deck. Another 10 weeks of vigorous brainstorming and revisions based on feedback resulted in a version that we had a lot more confidence in. By Jan 2009, we decided that we were getting closer to what seemed like a real idea with a defensible value proposition. It was time to start reaching out to investors and raise money for our venture. By February 2009, all Sharat and I were doing in our time outside of our day jobs was connecting with potential angel investors to drum up support for our idea. While we did the bit on pitching to investors with our slide deck, we also reckoned that it was important to put together a working prototype that would demonstrate our idea more directly. It was also real proof of our commitment, since we were pouring our time and money into making this real, not just peddling a slide deck to gauge interest in the investment community. Through the months of March, April, and May, we continued to seek money in what (we were told) was possibly the worst economic climate since the tech bubble burst in 2000, and in spite of being told by numerous people that raising money for a start-up at such a time didn’t sound like it would go anywhere.

It helps that Sharat and I both share a healthy disregard for the impossible. We kept ploughing ahead, pitching to investors, refining our business plan continuously, and always listening to the feedback we got but making our own judgements. Today we have a real company, an (albeit small) office, a solid business plan, and funding committed from angel investors who believe in our vision.

Clearly, this is only the tip of the iceberg and a lot remains to be done. But at least we’ve made it this far from being merely a thought that started in my head as I drove home each evening on the 495 Capital Beltway in DC.

You know what they say about succeeding in golf? It’s the direction that matters, not how far you hit the ball.

I think starting up is a little bit like that.

In the 28 years of my existence on this planet, there have been moments that have been imprinted in my mind so vividly that I visualize them as Technicolor films in slow motion that when replayed bring back a gush of emotions from those defining moments of my life. I may not be able to yet look back at this from the future but something tells me today is one such moment.

Today is my last day as an employee of Hillcrest Labs, Inc., where I’ve spent nearly the last 4 years working on exciting products at a young and dynamic start-up company.  For the first time in my career that began after I graduated from IIT Madras in 2001, I will no longer be seeking employment at a major (or start-up) corporation. I am leaving to pursue what has long been my dream and the singular goal of my career – to start my own company.

Today not only marks the end of what is perhaps the most defining experience in my career so far, but also the beginning of my last 17 days of residence in the United States of America. After 7 years in 3 different cities of the US I’m moving back to the only country that is my home, India.

People close to me have always known that when I first set foot on American soil on January 20th, 2002, I had every intention of tracing this exact path through my time in the US and eventually returning to India one day. And following through on a promise I made to myself all those years ago is a truly liberating feeling. I don’t know if the word “liberating” quite captures how I feel, but knowing that I am still in control of my life and not yet the victim of inescapable routine that seems to engulf us all as we grow older and more accustomed to a steady life, definitely feels quite liberating.

The logical question to ask (and no doubt one that I’ve been asked a lot these last few weeks) is why I’m choosing to leave the US and go back to India.

My arrival in the US was in pursuit of a dream that I had nurtured my entire life. I had been admitted to Wash U to pursue a degree in Computer Science and it was my shot at making my career in the only thing that ever truly captivated my imagination and it meant the world to me. It was a vindication of everything I had taught myself outside of classrooms (given that I was learning Chemical Engineering inside!) and a reinforcement of my belief that one’s determination and steady effort towards a goal could get you there, even if it was not obvious to everybody around you how you possibly could pull it off.

In the years I have spent living in the US I have grown to love and appreciate America for what it is. My varied experiences have influenced my growth and broadened my outlook as an individual, which is why I feel so overwhelmingly positive about the life I have led. As I often like to say, I may not be an American citizen but I am to some extent American in my thinking, having spent some of my most crucial years in the universities and companies of the US.

I am returning to India now mostly in pursuit of yet another dream. I say mostly because there are of course a multitude of reasons but the most important one is really about a dream. A dream that I have nurtured from the time I was first fascinated by the history of the great technology companies of America and when I first came across the word start-up. As I read everything I could on the subject, sitting on the trading desks at Morgan Stanley in New York, it became quite apparent to me that if I wanted to really do this myself some day I had to learn by being at a start-up to begin with. Where could I learn the ropes than at an actual start-up? Where could I gather the skills that were crucial to making an actual company out of nothing more than an idea and pure determination? Hillcrest Labs is where I trained to one day start my own company and today I’m moving on to the second and most important part of any real training course: doing it yourself.

I’m 28 years old and I owe myself a shot at pursuing my dream. It is time to follow up with action on what have only been words and thoughts so far. This is about doing what I truly believe in and irrespective of how this turns out in the end I know it will be one hell of a ride!

(Editorial note: This post was originally composed on April 24th, 2009, but did not make the presses at that time because of an intervening vacation in Hawaii.)

I will always remember the 4th of November, 2008 for the rest of my life. Not because I witnessed a momentous occasion in US history but that I witnessed and indeed felt part of a truly defining moment in the history of the world.

Barack Obama’s sweeping win of the US Presidential Election yesterday re-ignited the hope that millions around the world carry in their hearts for the promise that is democracy. That humans are capable of transcending their differences, rising above race, class, and creed, and acting together for a greater common purpose. That a people that were once bitterly divided over racial equality only 40 years ago can cross over into a new era and elect a black president, and truly deliver on the promise of liberty, equality, and opportunity that is the cornerstone of the American dream.

Obama’s speech last night moved me to tears in a way I had never experienced before. For me and millions of others around the world, America had become a new nation and had shown to the world that it could once again claim its place as the beacon of hope for democracy and its ideals, as a country where the possibilities are limitless. I could now hope that the injustice I had seen the last 7 years in America, mostly hidden away in corners of decrepit neighbourhoods, may one day only be told about in history books as atrocities of the past. I could now hope for an America that views its responsibilities to the world (and the planet) in a radically different way, one that breaks away from the arrogance that has characterized its behaviour this past decade.

The promise of this historic moment was so powerful that I forgot briefly that I am not an American citizen and that my association with this country had only begun a few years ago. But in today’s world, in which we are all global citizens, does it matter that I belong to a land 10,000 miles away?

I realized that I care deeply about what had transpired here in the US because of what Obama stands for and his message to people everywhere, not just in America. I believe that in the decades and centuries to come, people all around the world will be inspired by Obama and this historic election in much the same way people have been inspired by Gandhi and MLK. I say this because I hope that one day the Indian democracy, the largest in the world, will too scale the same heights in what people believe is possible through self-determination in a multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic country.

Many years from now, I know I will be telling my children about this day. The day that Obama and America reminded the world that there always is hope. Always.

I’m sorry I’ve had to turn off comments on posts. I’m assuming, of course, that I still have readers left who want to leave me comments As it turns out, the spam problem has gotten really bad and I haven’t found the time to invest in getting the Captcha anti-spam plugin to work. When I do, things should go back to normal and comments will be enabled again!

In the meantime, if you want to say something, please write to me at ravi at rpmduplex dot net. I’d love to hear from you!

We Indians sure are a melodramatic lot. If you live a while in India, it won’t take you long to conclude that it’s not just our movies that love to resort to it at the drop of a hat (I will admit though that the new wave of Indian cinema is different in this regard) but that even the average auto-driver on the streets of Hyderabad has a penchant to resort to melodrama without much provocation at all.

In truth, it is an affliction that affects everybody from politicians who make sweeping statements on camera (NT Rama Rao, former CM of Andhra Pradesh, perfected this to an art when he was alive) to business leaders who use the media to make bombastic pronouncements as if they were actors in the grandest soap of them all.

This past week saw much the same penchant for melodrama on display, as Jet Airways unceremoniously laid off 1900 of its employees and then turned right around and hired them back in a heartbeat as the political and media heat got turned up on them.

The whole incident was ridiculous at so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin.

Let’s start with Jet Airways and the manner in which they went about laying people off. Clearly, the once-booming aviation sector in India has hit a really rough patch. With the price of oil more than doubling over the last year and the global financial meltdown hitting home, it was clear that the airline had to do some serious cost-cutting or run the risk of going bankrupt. While any professionally-managed company would go about this in a more sensible way, Jet decided that the best way to inform employees that they were being terminated was by announcing it to the media! Wait, the stupidity doesn’t end there. Employees were called up at the end of their day and simply told not to bother coming back the next! If there was ever the worst possible execution of a round of layoffs, this had to be it.

But it didn’t end there, of course. Before you knew it, there was an uproar amongst politicians, one of whom promised Jet that none of its flights would take off from Mumbai unless it took all employees back without condition. The ultimate quote came from Veerappa Moily, who said, “Hire and fire is not a proper labour policy… we do not approve [of] this.” The Congress also added, “India is not America.”

There you have it, the classic Indian socialist mindset mixed with hypocrisy at its best. We love capitalism only as long as it’s boom-time!

And sure enough, two days later, Jet’s Chairman, Naresh Goyal, announced that it was his decision to reinstate all employees who had been laid off.

“I apologise for all the agony you went through,” he told a news conference in Mumbai, adding that he could not bear to “see tears in their eyes”. “The management will have to understand sometimes in a family there are disagreements, but the father of the family decides.”

Although it was stressed over and over that the decision was not made under political pressure, I think we all know what went on behind the scenes!

This whole incident, I believe, is a reminder of how our country’s brush with globalization until now has been one really long party, starting from the early 90s. Salaries went up, up, up. You could change jobs every month of the year and only scale greater heights. The stock market kept smashing records and made us all feel like we had truly arrived on the global stage. In all the euphoria, nobody really cared that globalization is really a two-way street.

But make no mistake, the global financial crisis will take its toll in India. There will be retrenchment, cost-cutting and an overall slowdown of growth. People will be reminded that what goes up must indeed come down.

As they say in America, “The party’s over.”

I awake from my blogging slumber to record a very significant achievement in the life of my better half.

Just this past week, on the 26th of July, 2007, Vidya successfully defended her Ph.D thesis at Washington University in St. Louis. After 6 long, arduous years of a life dedicated to a single research problem in Chemical Engineering, she now rightly carries the right to be addressed as Dr. Vidya for the rest of her life. Dr. Vidya, if you’re reading this, let me just say – congratulations on getting done and reaching the very pinnacle of academic education!

I have to admit that I really didn’t know much about what it really took to get a Ph.D before I came to know Vidya, and didn’t give it much thought either. But when you think about it, can you imagine dedicating 6 years of your life working on solving a single research problem that has probably not been tackled before? Never giving up in spite of all the dead ends that seem to crop up every now and then? Finding ways to stay enthused and energetic about it even after frustrating moments that nearly killed the resolve and drive in you to do research? Having all kinds of people lecture you about doing a Ph.D when clearly you’re the one actually doing it and they are the ones hypothesizing?

I’ve realized that it takes an extraordinary amount of courage, grit, and determination to earn a doctorate and I’ve seen it all in Vidya as she went through the toughest of times in getting to where she is today.

Congratulations on earning your doctoral degree, Dr. Vidya. You have truly earned the 2 letters in front of your name.

Although much of this blog is about the things I do and think about, I have always refrained from talking publicly about my love life. Well, this time I am making an exception to announce a big event in my life

On January 26th this year (Republic Day), I’m getting married to my girlfriend of 3 years and the love of my life, Vidya.

Here’s a picture of the two of us outside her apartment in St. Louis:

The wedding’s in Bangalore and I’m currently enjoying the excitement in the family and all the usual chaos that accompanies every Indian wedding!

While we’re on the topic of my travels, perhaps I should mention that I recently got back from another business trip, which took me to a new corner of the globe. Having never been to the Far East (as a matter of fact, never east of Calcutta), I was naturally pretty excited when told that I would be required to make a quick trip to Korea in connection to a project that I’m currently working on.

As I began preparing for the trip, I was a little startled by the number of people who asked me the question, “So are you going to North or South Korea?”

North Korea?! What business would anybody ever have in North Korea, what with Kim Jong Il, Taepodong missiles and a non-existent economy? I was going to Seoul, which is in the the Republic of Korea, also known as South Korea.

I landed in Seoul’s Incheon airport along with two other colleagues from Hillcrest, after a 14.5 hour flight which took us over the North Pole (no, I wasn’t able to see it much as we flew over it – cloud cover was thick). And yes, what you hear about the airports in South East Asian countries is true – they’re light years ahead of all the other ones in America and Europe. It is true that they’ve been built more recently so I guess that isn’t a completely fair comparison

The first thing that struck me about Korea was how the highways and toll gates seemed straight out of America. Even the symbol for an Interstate highway is the same as in the US!

As we approached Seoul (Incheon’s actually about an hour away from Seoul), I noticed apartment buildings that seemed a lot more like the ones you see in Mumbai. There was something about it that felt like Mumbai, except perhaps with much better roads. I remember thinking to myself that when the large Indian metros fix some of their infrastructure problems, they’ll probably look a lot more like Seoul than an American city like, say, Chicago. Even the highways ran pretty close to actual dwellings which is why there was fencing at a lot of different stretches along the highway, possibly to prevent people and animals from getting directly on the highway without a vehicle.

My trip to Seoul lasted about 36 hours. The main purpose of our visit was a business meeting that took all of a day and ended with dinner at a traditional Korean restaurant where I put on my bravest front in trying out the myriad dishes that were brought out in front of us. We sat cross-legged on the wooden floor and ate using stainless steel chopsticks, a fact noted by our Korean hosts who seemed rather impressed.

Being a person who believes in being adaptable and experimenting with new cuisines, I definitely did my share of trying out Korean food that I had never heard of before. Some of it was definitely good while some others were definitely an acquired taste

It wasn’t really a long enough trip for me to sorely miss the food that I’m accustomed to, but I do remember yearning to eat food that was regular fare for me, instead of just seafood all the time. It’s interesting that in a foreign land that I knew nothing about, American food gave me the comfort that I usually seek from my own culture’s cuisine when in America.

My feeling at the time are best described by a conversation at the breakfast table with my colleague, Dave.

I had filled my plate up with the usual scrambled eggs, toast, etc. and was sitting down to devour it when Dave said to me, “Hmm, you don’t seem to be trying out any of the Korean food at the buffet.”

As I put butter on my toast I told him, “I’ll save being adventurous with the food for lunch and dinner. I need my regular American food at breakfast!”

Hello, gentle reader.

Hmm, this is almost beginning to feel somewhat unfamiliar. Clearly, it’s been a long time since I sat down to organize my thoughts into a blog post. And to think I made a resolution in the general direction of trying to actually write far more often!

One of the challenges of writing after a significant length of time is that of deciding exactly what to write about – a problem prolific posters rarely have (or so I imagine). But, this blog is, after all, about what I’m upto so what could possibly be better than me regale you with stories of my exploits around the world

My last post (in June) was actually composed aboard an Air France flight to Chennai and at that time, I was on a business trip to India (Bangalore, to be precise). On that trip, I also happened to turn 26 – an event that gave me a fair bit to think about.

For one, I’ve begun to realize that for the first time in my career (which, I admit, isn’t really saying much given how long I’ve actually been out of graduate school), I work with people even younger than I am. There was something cool about being the hip dude fresh from school with all the boundless enthusiasm. But wait, all of a sudden, I’m interviewing all these college kids, telling them what to do on my team, and attributing some of their tendencies to being “a little green!” Wow, life really has moved pretty quickly since I last noticed how old I was!

The plus side to being a little older is that I’m probably taken more seriously in business settings (from what I’ve seen). This is not to say that college students are not taken seriously but it’s just more likely that they have had less experience with real-world situations and thus, not the first choice to head a team or be given complete independent charge of something new (this tends to be skewed in startups, though).

If you’re a college student reading this, it’s probably disheartening to find that out but I want to say again that this is just a very general approximation. There are numerous exceptions to this, of course, and a lot depends on you and how quickly you learn and adapt. When you’re fresh out of college, you’re also extremely moldable and so what you do in the first 5 years out of college will very likely have a huge impact on what you do in the next 20.

Speaking of being fresh out of college, I will confess that one of the images that I saw of myself was that of being a laptop-toting globetrotting professional hopping from one continent to the next. To my rather naive self barely out of my teens, it seemed that the definition of success was just that – donning a cool-looking suit, travelling business class, with fingers typing away at something obviously important.

That was then, of course. I’m old enough now to be able to see through all the glamour and actually not be swayed much by tales of all these consultants and investment bankers raking up the frequent flyer miles (and their bank balances) and attending cocktail parties with the CEOs of the biggest corporations.

This reminds me of the time when I was doing my Masters at Wash U and I attended this information session by McKinsey. The chap giving us the presentation was an alumnus and was doing a pretty good job of selling us all on how consultants are above us mortals. At one point, as part of the list of benefits of working for McKinsey, he said something like, “McKinsey works only with Fortune 500 corporations and their senior management so if you come work for us, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with the CEOs of these companies.”

And it works beautifully on college kids, most of whom are not quite sure of what they really want to do and are easily seduced by dangling the carrot of an ultra-cool, highly “bragworthy” lifestyle in front of their eyes (yes, I was one of those people too). I have yet to come across a single person of my general age-group who is not swayed even slightly by such presentations, or for that matter what they hear from their friends in B school. It almost always is the case that they start thinking about why they can’t be consultants or investment bankers themselves

Now, I am not quite the aforementioned laptop-toting, important-looking business professional (and thank God, too, because I surely don’t want to spend most of my life just hopping from one timezone to the next), but I have in the recent past been sent to India on business a few times and needless to say, I love it.

I love the experience of just being in India; of seeing my parents and brother more than just once a year; of working with a dynamic Indian company to build a team of the smartest engineers; of living life in the new India, albeit for a week at a time; of reliving moments of my life growing up in Hyderabad; of noticing things about India and Indians that I never quite saw before. That, and some other perks that come with flying on business – check out the Lufthansa Business Lounge at Frankfurt airport to see what I mean. The bathrooms there are so clean I think I could sleep in them! Until my recent trip I used to think that business class was a ridiculous way to spend too much money but I know now how much more pleasant the whole experience of flying 21 hours non-stop can be!

While it may seem to me that I’m too old for one club (the 18-24 age group), it looks like I’m too young for another – the general age group that people travelling to India on business seem to fall into. At least if you go by my experience at Hyderabad’s airport.

I was making my way to get in line to check-in at the business-class counter when a guy rushed up to me and said,

“Sir, economy check-in is that way.”

“But isn’t this the line for business class?” I asked, somewhat puzzled.

I noticed a look of incredulousness on the guy’s face. But he quickly recovered.

“Oh, please go right ahead, sir.”

I smiled and continued to make my way to the check-in counter.

I don’t know if it was because I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that made the guy stop me but that was the moment that I thought to myself that being 26 was really not as much of a deal as I was making it out to be!