Demand for Tech > Supply
In 1996, I graduated in Commerce from a Tier II college in Bangalore. However, my dad wanted me to enter the sunrise sector, software / IT. How could a commerce graduate get into the tech industry? Lo, there were many bridge courses – two and three-year diploma courses to skill non-engineering graduates in the tech industry. I was enrolled in the advanced class for software. I learnt MS-DOS, MS Office and DBMS programming. My tryst with Tech happened during the launch of the famous Win 3.1
Onboarded to MS Office
As soon as I became conversant in MS Office suite, I was pleasantly surprised that I had multiple gig offers. I was excited that I could earn my income before completing the diploma course. One of the leading FMCG firms hired me as a corporate trainer to teach DBMS and MS Office to their employees. After that, I started teaching MS Office to a couple of corporates. As a result of these MS Office workshops, I used to get references for buying new PCs. In turn, I used to refer these leads to the hardware to one of the local PC assembling units. Assembled PCs were the most preferred as they were lighter on the purse.
Cafe De Airlines, Restaurant
One of my leads was from a restaurant – Cafe De Airlines, in Jayanagar, Bangalore. The owner of this restaurant explained the pain points in the billing system. So I started independently coding a solution in MS Foxpro. Whenever I used to get into friction points, I used to take assistance from my friends in the diploma course. This product was a point-of-sale solution which takes input table-wise, kitchen order tickets and prints the bill to the customers. So I started promoting this module to a couple of restaurants.
An Angel investor
During one of my sales calls in a bar and restaurant, I met a person who was in liquor distribution. He seemed to be excited about the tech industry and business opportunities. He voluntarily allowed me to work from his office space and gave few PCs to scale the POS product. Although I was very naive then, I accepted the offer and started building a team. This Angel investor had a liquor distribution business. He used to introduce me to many restaurants. I had a five-member tech team, and over fifteen pubs /bars used our point-of-sale product. Few of them exist even today. CafedeAirlines, Jayanagar, Bangalore. Nandini restaurant at JC Road. Mars 2211, We built these on Foxpro on DOS.
.com bust
The team was keen to upgrade the product to windows from the DOS platform. So we were building both on Visual Basic and in Visual Foxpro.
All was going well, and then it was the Year 2000. I remember that many IT firms in Bangalore were laid off. Many were worried about Y2K. I vividly remember many BPO and IT firms laid off many employees. The new trend about .com scared my angel investor. So, without any prior notice, one day, this angel investor asked me to wind up the shop and vacate the office. He said that all his friends who had invested in large firms had exited as he felt the IT sector wouldn’t do well.
Adversity
I was worried about the team members because this was a bolt from the blue. So then, we all searched for jobs in large and mid-tech firms. Fortunately, since all my team members were engineering graduates, they could secure employment in tech firms in the next six to twelve months. But the funny part is I couldn’t get entry into large and mid-tech firms as I needed an engineering background. So, as a result of non-engineering graduate, I had to reckon with other career options reluctantly.
Insights
Sharing my experiences and insights will help early-stage startup founders and team members.
- I was making money from corporate training and building tech solutions. However, I chose to build a Point of Sale product.
- Choosing MS-Dos as an OS platform and Foxpro as a tech stack allowed me to ship the products quickly.
- Recruiting team members from smaller towns like Vellore and the outskirts of Chennai was prudent.
- Onboarding a strategic investor as an angel helped me quickly to reach many bars and restaurants.
- Why didn’t I onboard a couple of more angel investors? Why was I complacent with one angel investor?
- Why didn’t I focus on scaling the business?
- Why didn’t I onboard a large restaurant which had multiple branches?
