The Exchanges

Q Rajesh, uh, you did your masters from Columbia University. You tried many businesses, nothing worked. Then you decided to return to India. It was during this process that an idea that would later become hundred and fifteen million dollars came to you. Tell us about this journey, right? All the failures during this time.

A Sure. I finished my I.D. Bombay, and then I went to the U.S. like many others for, for the studies. But when I went, my father told me something which I could not, of course, forget. He said, finish your master's in nine months, work for two years, and then come back to India. He had done the same in the mid-sixties, so he saw no reason for me to hang around any more time after that, and that's exactly what I did. I came back to India in May, uh, 1992. And for the first two and a half years, a lot of initiatives, uh, that I tried actually didn't work. I created along with my, uh, co-founder, uh, Sanjay Jain at that time, uh, we created a multimedia database. We built an image processing solution. We tried some enterprise software solutions, but none of these actually got any traction. And then, uh, Mid to late 94, I realized that whatever we had created had to die. It's only when you close some doors can you then start opening new doors. Things were not working. I thought of myself as God's gift to India, you know, uh, IIT, US education coming back, and my dreams sort of lay in tatters because nothing was working. But at that time, I was also reading a lot about, uh, Uh, the internet. You know, my father had, uh, used to always subscribe to some of the best publications, um, and foreign international publications, magazines, and we used to get them at home. Uh, this was, of cou…

AI assessment note: “for the first two and a half years, a lot of initiatives... didn't work”

Q And, and you came from a well-to-do family so that your family could send you to US, uh, right? Or how was your upbringing like?

A So, uh, my father was a self-made entrepreneur. I mean, he's, when he started his life, he had a family debt of almost a couple of lakhs that he had to repay. He had come back to India. His father had passed away in the sixties. He had four siblings to essentially take care of and get married. Um, and he, I saw him firsthand as an entrepreneur. I mean, my earliest memories were where there were probably 10 of us staying, uh, in a small sort of, uh, probably a few hundred square feet place in Chichpokli, uh, just after I was born. My mom would carry me from one bus stop to another bus stop because it would say five paise on the bus fare if she walked a distance of a kilometer. I mean, she tells me some of these stories. I don't have too many memories, but, uh, what I do also recollect is at the end of every month, Every day we would sit and write down the expenses in a diary at home because we had to manage on the limited money that my father was basically earning. But my father essentially became an entrepreneur. He tried many things in his life. Some worked, some did not work. But I saw from him firsthand that, you know, failure is part of the terrain, part of the journey that is there. So the early beginnings were not great. Uh, but, um, by the time I had gone to IIT, of course, we were doing quite well. My father had made some very good investments. He was a civil engineer, …

AI assessment note: “So the early beginnings were not great. Uh, but, um, by the time”

Q And, uh, why did you choose to build a Proficon? You, you, you are a very, you know, uh, big advocate of Proficon. What is this word and why, why is this approach? And, uh, uh, that also comes to my mind, right? The next question is, uh, the patient approach of building it in 25 years. Venture capital companies are built in seven to 10 years.

A So I'll take the second one first, and I'll come to the Proficon. So I think I have to write off the first 10 years of Netcore. When I was leading it, I think I was the problem there. So really Netcore, if I look at it that way, the growth journey is about 15 years old. Um, now, what happened about Proficon was, you know, about a couple of years ago in one of our internal advisory board meetings, uh, someone said that, look, everyone talks about Unicorn, Unicorn, Unicorn. Netcore has a very interesting model. You are profitable. You are growing. You have been bootstrapped. Okay. You have not raised external capital. How can you tell your story better to the world? And it sort of just struck me that, okay, we can call ourselves a proficon. So just the word sort of just came to me. And I said it at that time and people liked it. Hey, you know, that's a nice word. And then when I started talking about it to other people, I realized that that's one word which sticks to people, you know, unicorn, proficon. And I defined Proficon as a company which is private, profitable, promoter bootstrapped, and highly valuable. Highly valuable I would say is at least say over a hundred million dollars because you have a lot of private companies who are not, uh, sort of valued. And then I realized that, okay, India world was a Proficon. I had not raised capital. Netcore is also a Proficon, uh, now…

AI assessment note: “I defined Proficon as a company which is private, profitable, promoter bootstrapped”

Q Rajesh, in one of your blogs, you said that writing is a way for you to organize your thinking. Can you describe your writing schedule to us and your publishing schedule, and how do you bring that kind of a discipline?

A Sure. So, writing has been a part of me for a very long time. Um, it started probably in 96 or so. I was approached by, um, Um, Val, Valentine D'Souza, he used to work at Express Computer, for writing a fortnightly column in the Indian, in Express Computer at that time. I'd never written much before that. So, other than writing for a school magazine, little bit here and there, or in IIT, nothing much. Um, he said Rajaj, I'm going to give you a whole page. We need to educate people on the internet, about the internet. What is it? I mean, a whole page, I think, was like two and a half, tabloid size, about two to 3000 words, and every 15, every four, every two weeks. So that's how I fell in love with writing. As I would write those columns, you know, more and more. Once you start writing one or two columns, then you know, you're always looking for new ideas on what am I going to write next. So you always then start making a list of topics on what you're going to write in the future and so on. And I think around 1909, ah, this whole blog thing start, blog revolution started taking off. And I remember Dave Weiner at scripting.com was a big inspiration. He used to write every day, ah, some links and some writings. And then I said, why can't I do that? So that is how I started writing every day. I said something new every day, because the mind, my thinking was that if it's every day, …

AI assessment note: “So that is how I started writing every day. I said something new every day”

Q And, uh, uh, you, you brought in external management, right? What are the various pivots that Netcore went through? And today, you know, if you can share in terms of revenue, size of Netcore, the geographies you have clients in your offices, right? And, and how it has compounded over the years.

A So in Netcore, uh, we started essentially around 2007, eight with, uh, enterprise SMS. Um, and then email marketing. Because we had the Linux mail server business, some of the customers, our customers are coming to us and saying that, hey guys, you know, email very well. We want to send out a lot of emails to our, uh, customers who have got email IDs. They want to send out marketing campaigns. So how do we create a platform for that? That's what started our journey in both of these directions. Um, we had tried a few B to C things, but they don't work out. Uh, so we dropped that. We don't do any B to C things now. Now, With these two, they started, uh, sort of, our, our, uh, from 2007 onwards, the, sort of, journey for, first, sort of, uh, growth era of Netcore. In 2014, a colleague of mine, Veer, he came up to me and said, you know, Radeesh, I've been hearing about this word MarTech, um, quite a bit, and we need to look at this. Uh, I said, okay, I'd never heard that word before. So I said, what is it? And he explained to me what marketing technology was, what MarTech was. And there was a conference in the US in August, uh, um, of that year, which then both of us attended the first MarTech conference. Um, which was there, and that really opened our eyes to the world beyond just sending emails and SMSs that, oh, marketers can actually do a proper customer journeys, engagement. T…

AI assessment note: “we started essentially around 2007, eight with, uh, enterprise SMS.”

Q And can you tell us about the exit? What was, like, was it inbound? Was it you with iBankers looking for an acquirer for the company?

A Yeah. So I had an investment banker for about a year, um, before 99 also we were, because we were always trying to raise money. So, you know, we would get, because we were the best known Indian site, so there was always interest, um, but, you know, I'll tell you a small story. I was at a US investor's office, um, probably in 98, and, um, I mean, remember, we were a very small team. When I sold, we were all of 20 people, so it was always me who had to go, uh, do these meetings alone. So, uh, they said, hey, you know what, we've got your basic plan, but I don't have five-year projections. Uh, for your business. So my answer was that look, you know, I run this business like, like life and death. Okay. I will do whatever it takes for us to succeed. You tell me what numbers you want in the fifth year to invest. And I will fill in years one, two, three, and four. The meeting ended in five minutes. They never invested. Um, uh, but that was the type of person I was. So what happened in 1909 is that a lot of money started coming into the Indian internet also. A lot of companies raised money. A lot of advertising started happening, and I realized that because we didn't have that much amount of capital, I could not spend any money on advertising. I could not spend on building the senior leadership team also in the business. So I was, we had, I had hired at that time Merrill Lynch, DSP Mer…

AI assessment note: “So I had an investment banker for about a year”