Shiv nadar arjun malhotra headstrong

So, after 23 years with HCL, I left. Pretty much around the same time, Goldman Sachs got in touch with me. They wanted to invest in the Indian services sector and were looking for someone who could do industry due diligence. As their consultant, my job was to find them a firm worth investing in. Soon, it became clear that they wanted a squeaky clean company—with smooth processes, efficient structures and no skeletons in the boardroom, so to speak.

That was frankly an impossible prospect. I suggested we start a company and keep it squeaky clean. Goldman Sachs agreed. And I went out looking for people who could work with the firm. I knew of a few people who had left HCL and started on their own in Virginia, I contacted them and asked them to come up with a business plan. One, attracting the right people, who could go up the value chain, was difficult.

We did not have a brand in the US. How could we attract, say, a partner from Accenture to join us? Also, there was an immense pull from the market to go into e-commerce. We steered ourselves that way and it was a good direction for us. We had to use the slowdown to our advantage. In earlythe internet bubble burst. Luckily for us, we had sufficient reserves and managed the crisis.

It also helped that we were an Indian firm used to working with resource constraints. We kept our costs under control and stayed cash neutral throughout the slowdown. If there was ever an opportunity to make TechSpan stand out, it was now. Shiv is most noted for his charitable works. Inhe set up Shiv Nadar Foundation, which supports various rural and urban areas in the field of education and art by establishing many institutes across the country SSN Institutions, VidyaGyan, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art are the institutes and museum set up by Shiv Nadar Foundation.

He even contributed crore for the charitable activities through the foundation. Similarly, when Mohan Reddy was looking for the second round of funding, Arjun Malhotra invested in his company. Most seem to think so. Dasgupta says the loose unstructured environment in his company is similar to HCL. The HCL community remains a well-networked one even in the Valley.

As usual he knew many people, but the number of ex-HCL people there astounded him. Grandfather was director of the museum at the time and we stayed at the nearby Rippon street. After we started HCL inI went back and opened the Calcutta office, managing their eastern operations for a year. Tell us about the transition. After graduation, I joined DCM as senior management trainee and was with them for five years.

Fortunately, when they got into electronics I was one of the few electronics engineers in the company that was essentially into fertilizers, textiles and food products. So the six of us moved out, convinced that microprocessors would change the world and that we would do things on our own. Sans a business background or plan, armed only with bravado and a feeling that if technology companies like IBM and ICL could sell junk to the country, we were sure we could do better.

It was more of patriotism than logic and the conviction that technology would make a paradigm shift, changing everything along the way that determined our decision. We were bootstrapped till we went public and for 20 years ran the company with that. When did you leave the company and why? I wanted to be mentally free to pursue what I wanted to.

When Internet came up and HCL was going through a reorganization, it was clear that they wanted to wait and watch which way it was going and then go behind it. From a company point of view this was good, but from a fund point of view it was no fun. It was like you are not to fool around with technology as it is evolving. I talked to them and said that I was shiv nadar arjun malhotra headstrong a slave to my own creation and was not being able to do what I truly wanted to.

After arguing for more than a year, I managed to get an amicable out. I started working from home and moved out when my wife said that she had married me for good or bad, but certainly not for lunch. At that time I was consulting with Goldman Sachs. The next step was to start Techspan, a systems integration and consulting firm with funding from Goldman Sachs and Walden International.

Did the dotcom bust of have any effect on Techspan?

Shiv nadar arjun malhotra headstrong

The impact was there but the timing was wrong. My father was unwell passed away later that year and I feel I delayed taking action. But thanks to my HCL experience, where for years we ran a bootstrap operation, running tight cash flows was not difficult. When the dotcom crash happened, we told our people they could return to India, for we could not pay them for sitting idle in the US.

People think in the US there is no loyalty, but we managed to stay together. We let our people be innovative in their solutions. Technically the company stayed together with everyone assuming that the business would come back one day.