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

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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.

Jyothi Reddy
Image Credit: jyothireddy.com

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.

Defying the stereotypes, Afghan woman makes it to Entrepreneurship

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Those who say women should better stay behind the four walls need a reality check. Looking at women excelling in all the fields one must realize the need of breaking all the stereotypical notions formed against their capabilities. From being a teacher to flying airplanes, women these days are leaving their imprints everywhere.

One such woman is Roya Mahboob, the founder and CEO of Afghan Citadel Software Company. She was born in Herat, Afghanistan a country with more than 85% illiteracy among women. Her childhood was not a bed of roses as she had to leave her homeland with family with the advent of Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. She took refuge in Pakistan and Iran like other homeless people of her country. This was the tough time for her and others. She was not allowed to attend a school and go outside to play. Who then knew, this refugee would one day become an entrepreneur? Her journey continued and she returned back to Afghanistan in 2003 and put her first step towards the entrepreneurial journey. She learned English while volunteering at a French NGO. In 2005, she enrolled herself in Herat University to pursue bachelor in Computer Science for information and communications technology. Since then she never looked back. Where women in Afghanistan even today remain behind the veil, Roya Mahboob has dared to break the stereotype and stand aloof from the line. After completing her graduation, she worked as IT Director in her university and also acquired an MBA in Information Technology in 2011.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

A woman of substance

Her progress towards entrepreneurship began when she was included among seven Afghan entrepreneurs as a part of the Herat Information Technology program. While pursuing her MBA, Mahboob with her two university classmates, laid the foundation of Afghan Citadel Software Company in 2010 with an investment of $20,000. Such a risky initiative she took with a positive intention of providing an opportunity to recent university graduates particularly women to look for a job in Afghanistan’s growing tech market. This initiative proved to be helpful for all those women like her who wanted to break away from the prejudiced notions and stand independent on their feet. The company aimed at developing software as required by the clients that were mainly government ministries, international organizations and universities. Thus, the company began to come into recognition of not just few but many.

Roya Mahboob is applauded worldwide for her efforts in giving a boost to technology and encourage women. She despite receiving several threats from her own countrymen kept her pace on and responded on these threats-

“You have to show everybody that men and women are equal. Women can do something if you allow them. Give them opportunity and they can prove themselves”.

Empowering women

She later joined in with partnership with Film Annex, to launch the Afghan Development project in the year 2012. Mahboob and Film Annex together are striving to make internet classrooms in the schools of Afghanistan so as to increase the connectivity in the education system throughout the country and offer them a hopeful future so that they are not led astray and don’t end up in joining the poisonous terror groups.

She has successfully collected many awards and titles for her social initiatives. Her nonprofit, Digital Citizen Fund, is helping women realize their potential, strength and freedom to fulfill their goals. Her tech efforts are aimed at connecting business and social world. She also got a place in the 2013 list of Times magazine of “100 Most Influential People In The World”.  Roya Mahboob’s determination, courage and entrepreneurial capabilities will surely encourage other women not only in Afghanistan but other developing countries to take charge of themselves and step out of their protective environment to participate in all sectors of economic life important to build stronger economy and to improve the quality of life for family and community.

An Indian CEO wants BMW for all his employees

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A simple comment on Hacker News motivated an employee of Zoho Corp. to leave his cushy job and build a b2b company that recently got $31 million in funding at $250 valuation from Tiger Global.  Company in case is Freshdesk and the person behind this hugely successful venture is Girish Mathrubootham.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Fresdesk founded this cloud-based customer support platform in 2010. Girsih was VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp when he read on Hacker News that Zendesk (now a competitor of Freshdesk) is increasing prices by 60% to 300%. In this comment of an unhappy customer of Zendesk, Girsih saw a potential business opportunity.


There was another personal experience where Girish never got a response to his 20+ emails from insurance company for his damaged TV. But when he posted his plight on a public forum he got immediate attention of the company.  He realized that he had  all that it takes to create a platform like Zendesk. He decided to hit the $37 billion customer relationship market with a SaaS based customer support platform along with his colleague Shan Krishnasamy.

They worked day & night with dedication for eight months to get the product out in market. In 2011, Freshdesk signed up its first client, Australia’s Atwell College. Freshdesk also emerged as winner at Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge winning $40,000. Girish and his co-founder maintained from the beginning that if within a year Freshdesk doesn’t get enough traction, they will shutdown and go back to job. However, that situation never arrived and soon they signed up 100 customer and became Zendesk’s biggest rival.

Smart Moves
Since inception Girish and his team planned everything from marketing to operations within budget. When they couldn’t integrate a US payment gateway to handle recurring payments which is essential part of any SaaS business and since their target customers were in US, Girish went ahead and registered a US company while sitting in India for just $1278. This paved the way to get a US bank account and integration of recurring payment gateway.

Girish always loved the work culture at Zoho Corp and felt the  strong sense of ownership and pride of being part of the Zoho group. He brought the same culture to his company. Unlike other big startups, Freshdesk don’t prefer to hire people from IIT or IIMs. On the lines of Zoho, Freshdesk also prefer to hire top talent of tier II, tier III  educational institutes. Girish is a kind of  CEO whose happiness lies within the happiness of his employees. In an interview to ET, on being asked about wealth creation, he answered

“Wealth creation to me means creating wealth not only for founders and shareholders, but also for all the employees who are passionately building the company along with us.I think it is a great opportunity that I have as the founder to be able to create and share wealth. When I started the company I told my wife that I am not starting a company for me to buy a BMW, I am starting a company so that all my employees can buy BMWs.”

Once on a trip to San Francisco, Girish was proud to know from a taxi driver that he uses Freshdesk on his day job as support engineer. In 2012 Freshdesk launched a mobile SDK, Mobihelp, which lets its clients to engage their customers within their mobile app. In 2015, Freshdesk acquired a social recommendation platform Frilp and a live video chat company 1CLICK to strengthen its customer support platform. Today, Freshdesk is used worldwide and has a huge customer base with a plush office in Chennai along with branches in cities like London, Sydney and San Francisco.

Image Credit: Freshdesk

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

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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

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

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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.

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

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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.Farhan Masood

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.