Their experience illustrates the importance of understanding early what elements of a venture stoke your passions
In early 2009, Manish Sharma and Lalana Zaveri sat down to dinner together, late in the evening as usual.
The two were grateful for opportunities to be together alone even though the business they had co-founded and ran together, Printo Document Services, inevitably came up all too frequently in the conversation. As their talk drifted to thoughts about the coming year, each realized that both felt it was time to think not just about the business, but about their passions in life. Printo had been moderately successful and had a promising future, even in the difficult economic environment that appeared to be looming. How should it and they change going forward, they wondered, so they could build a happy future together as well as a prosperous company?
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| Sharma’s second venture was enormously satisfying to him and taught him a great deal, but it was not as successful as his first startup had been. “We were victims of timing, since we started just as the dotcom bust happened,” he relates. “It was the most passionate time of my life, but I lost my shirt.” Manish Sharma and Lalana Zaveri |
Paths of two entrepreneurs
Manish Sharma was born and grew up in Mumbai, the son of an engineer who became the commercial head of a small ship repair yard. He graduated in 1995 from Bombay University with a degree in computer engineering. For a few months, he worked in India’s first NASDAQ-listed Internet startup, but he quickly realized that he wanted to start his own company. Seven months after graduation, he and a few close friends bootstrapped a classic “garage” startup, DBS Internet Services. Eventually, this web solutions company grew to a size of 120 people and won several large contracts; it still exists today in a different form, headed by one of the founding partners.
Sharma’s first entrepreneurial venture succeeded beyond his initial imaginings, but he says, “I was always bothered that we had to work to customers’ business specifications, so we weren’t doing creative things. I wanted to do a product company. Solutions are good, but I wanted to think of a gap and come up with a product to plug it.” In pursuit of this dream, he founded a product company and moved to Cupertino, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. “You have to be close to your market and you have to be in the right ecoystem,” he explains. “Indian software companies have to date been notably unsuccessful creating products.” Sharma helped pioneer the cross-border model that was to become so popular in the next decade, locating his development team in Mumbai while he and a few others focused on business development in the US.
Sharma’s second venture was enormously satisfying to him and taught him a great deal, but it was not as successful as his first startup had been. “We were victims of timing, since we started just as the dotcom bust happened,” he relates. “It was the most passionate time of my life, but I lost my shirt.” After the firm went under, Sharma moved to Chicago, Illionis to work for a small, niche software firm. “I had no particular reason to be in Chicago,” he says, “but they were the one who were willing to hire me.” After a few years, Sharma’s firm relocated him to the UK on special assignment. “Their European headquarters were there, and they used that to set up a development center in India,” he says. “I helped them establish that. I’m a commercial technology person, so my role was getting the team in place to run the center.” As a result of this experience, he decided to stay in the UK. “I began believing I wanted to gravitate toward India, and this seemed like a good move,” he says. Another important reason is that he had found the woman he wanted to marry, the sister of a dear friend, and the UK seemed like a better place to launch their lives together. “US immigration laws were getting silly,” he explains. “They didn’t let a spouse have a work permit if you had one, and that wasn’t going to work for us.”
Sharma’s new wife, Lalana Zaveri, had also grown up in Mumbai and had known him for a long time, but didn’t imagine he would become her husband. “Manish and my older sister studied together and they dated when they were both 16,” she relates. “I did not like him at all then!” Ten years later when she returned from studying in the UK, the two bumped into each other and went out for a couple of meals. “We met afresh and started a new relationship, and eventually I decided to move to the UK to be with him,” she says. The two married in 2002.
Zaveri’s family history suggested that she was perhaps a more natural candidate to start a business than he was. Her father was a fairly well-to-do business owner whose company made diamond-tipped tools used for cutting auto parts. “For a long time, I thought I would go into that business and it took me a long time to realize that was not the way I wanted to go,” she comments. After completing a degree from a university in Mumbai with a degree in life sciences, she joined her father’s business and spent time working in different departments, ranging from dealer relations to product development to business development.
Interested in taking over the family business and scaling it, Zaveri quit the family firm after two years in order to take a position at Xerox. “I wanted the experience of working in a big company, because I thought I could add more value to my family’s company with insight from how an enterprise like Xerox is managed,” she clarifies. At Xerox, Zaveri moved through several different departments as part of her training. “I spent some time in the servicing area, where engineers go out and service photocopies, but I spent most of my time in the sales department,” she says. “I learned about the functionality of the equipment, who the customers were, and realized how profitable printing can be as a business, especially digital printing.”
After two years, Zaveri took a break to earn an MBA at the University of Nottingham in the UK. “It was a bit of a whim, not anything well structured,” she recalls. “I wanted to take a break from working, study some more, and live abroad. Because I hadn’t worked in my undergraduate field, I needed to go back to school in a more general area and management seemed logical.” Upon returning she rejoined the family firm, establishing a distributorship to import a British product allied to the tooling industry into India. Eventually, however, Zaveri realized that her ideas for the family business differed from those of her father and uncles. “They didn’t want to grow beyond a certain size, and they didn’t want to professionalize the company,” she explains.
At this time, Zaveri’s relationship with Sharma was blossoming into marriage, so instead of returning to her family’s company, she left Xerox and moved to the UK to be with him. “I didn’t have a proper job, so I worked with two different stores,” she recounts. “I learned a lot about how consumers behave and I had a lot of fun.” Zaveri’s MBA served her in good stead as she learned more about retail. “I was a customer service person, not a manager, but I kept putting on my manager’s hat and asked myself what I would do differently in shift timing, stock taking, and so on,” she says.
While Sharma was building up his company’s development center in India, Zaveri returned to Xerox. Once his special assignment was over, Sharma decided it was time for him to earn his MBA. He chose Oxford University’s business school because it offered him a scholarship and because he did not want to spend two years in graduate school. “Economics sounded interesting and they offered a focus on entrepreneurship, which sounded good to me,” he elaborates. Zaveri worked for Xerox Developing Markets Organization (DMO) in London while her husband was studying.
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