DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

The story of the Bangalore-based mobile solutions company and the entrepreneural journey of its founder has a lot of learnings embedded in it

Narasimha Suresh felt a wave of pride wash over him as the batsman from Bangalore’s Royal Challengers IPL team stood at the wicket, awaiting the bowler’s next delivery.

From his seat, he could see hundreds of his fellow fans bent over their mobile phones, many talking excitedly with their friends? A newcomer to the stadium might wonder whether the team’s fans had lost interest in their master blaster, but Suresh knew what was happening—the spectators were using their phones to get statistics, commentary, and even gossip between deliveries. While basking in the unmatched splendor and excitement of live cricket, they were also able to access all the commentary and information that made watching the sport on television enjoyable.

I was extremely lucky because my family always supported my decisions and never told me what I should do. I think a person should know where he will be happy. I joined a startup as a design engineer for a type of learning and satisfaction you can’t get in a large company. Narasimha Suresh

How? Suresh’s venture, Telibrahma, had wired the stadium with a Bluetooth network accessible from anywhere in the stadium, and working with partners was delivering rich content plus advertising to those fans who had Bluetooth switched on. Since the launch of Telibrahma’s “BluFi” network in 2007, the company had acquired hundreds of high-traffic locations such as stadiums, malls, coffee shops and movie theaters. As customers roamed from one to another, they were remembered and served innovative content, entertainment, and advertising from a central bank of servers.

Now, Suresh saw the company at a crossroad. Its original investor was closing its fund and needed to exit the venture, which it could do profitably thanks to Telibrahma’s success. What kind of strategic investor should Telibrahma look for, and how should it continue to expand in order to build on the unique position it had carved out? With a bitter economic recession looming, what was the best way to grow the company in an increasingly gloomy market for young entrepreneurial ventures?

Suresh’s entrepreneurial path
Suresh grew up in a middle-class environment in Bangalore, and graduated in 1996 from PES Institute of Technology with a degree in engineering. He joined Siemens’ operations in Bangalore because he wanted to develop software in a cutting-edge technology company. After three years, he joined a startup enterprise as its first employee. Explaining why a fast-moving young engineer would leave a prestigious company for an entrepreneurial venture, he explains, “I was extremely lucky because my family always supported my decisions and never told me what I should do. I think a person should know where he will be happy. I joined a startup as a design engineer for a type of learning and satisfaction you can’t get in a large company.”

Suresh was hired as a design engineer by eCapital solutions, a venture providing software solution integration services for the telecommunications and financial services sectors. With Chase Manhattan and CIBC Capital Partners as investors, eCapital set up business competence centers in Europe and North America to help ventures rapidly develop solutions for enterprise customers. Suresh Comment, “eCapital wanted to do a lot of work in the mobile space, which was getting hotter in 1999. We were the first to deliver SMS transactions in the UK and the first to deliver mobile-based social networking and chatting solutions for telecom operators. Working there gave me a lot of insight into mobility and mobile technologies.”

Additionally, Suresh learned first-hand how to turn an idea into a company. “I joined them to get exposed to the way startups are built.” he recalls. “If you focus on the fact that you are there to build a company with your peers, you can’t have a better learning ground than a startup. That’s exactly what happened in my case. But a startup is a place where you have to take a lot of initiative, and if you are not that kind of person, you shouldn’t join one. You can experiment a lot—you can suggest new products, new ways to sell products, new internal processes, and so on. If you expect the company to provide you an education, you won’t get one, but if you take initiative, you can learn so much.”

Although he was hired as a design engineer, Suresh’s position gave him broad scope and flexibility, typical of a startup in which each key employee must wear many hats. This allowed him to expand his skill set beyond the technical. He says, “I was involved in a lot of activities, including product management and marketing. I build my own team and we designed our own product road maps. Nothing can teach you more than real world experience, and I never felt the lack of a formal management degree. In a startup, you should be okay to take risks and make some small mistakes. That’s just the opportunity eCapital provided me and that I hope I am providing to others in my present company.”

In 2002, eCapital spun off a separate venture called eVector, which developed a WAP-based Internet solution for mobile devices. Suresh went over to the new enterprise, but it was eventually closed, while eCapital was sold to Leading Edge. Suresh then worked at Wipro for nine months, defining solutions for different enterprise customers “That was a great learning experience, but I wanted to start something fairly quickly, so I took some small assignments for a while, and then launched Telibrahma in 2004,” he relates.

By late 2008, Telibrahma was operating a digital media network in more than 400 locations throughout India, serving more than 80 brands. That was accomplished through a significant company transformation

Telibrahma begins
“eCapital and eVector gave me huge experience in mobility, and with wireless growing so fast in India, I thought the best opportunity would be to create a product company in that space because the market is here,” Suresh reminisces. “In Europe and the US, investments were happening again after the post-dotcom period, but not at a high rate. A lot of ventures were raising $500,000 to $1 million. Therefore, I thought there would be an interesting opportunity for an Indian product company to build some components and license their intellectual property to Western startups that had limited funding and needed faster time to market so they would have more ability to experiment.”

To exploit this opening, Suresh decided to start a new venture with Ravi BR as co-founder. He explains, “I had hired him in eVector, and we worked well together; he was always with me. He was my most preferred partner, and he knew the mobile domain.” However, no funding was available in 2004 for such an early stage company, and neither partner had significant personal resources to invest. “We had to base the company on positive cash flow and profitability from day one, and the 2004 economic scenario let us do exactly that,” Suresh says. “We focused on mobile solutions, marketing to companies in the US and Europe. We built applications and components ourselves.”

Ravi specialized in technology, while Suresh concentrated on sales, marketing and customer relationships. “Once you decide to become an entrepreneur, you then have to do what is good for the company,” Suresh says. “I felt that instead of hiring someone with a sales and marketing background who might not understand the technology we were trying to build, I should give it a shot, rather than recruit a costly resource. We had done a lot of work for European clients in eCapital and eVector, so I had decent exposure to that market. I always had a pretty good personal network, and the people who gave us our initial orders knew me from my earlier career and various forums.”

The partners did try to bring more seasoned functional managers, but that proved problematic. Suresh Recalls, “We hired a couple of management graduates to join us, but I realized that entrepreneurship is a different ball game. We had a small period in 2005 when we were not able to draw salaries from our cash flows, and some of the management guys could not withstand that pressure, so they left the company.” However, the partners were able to use their personal networks to hire versatile people who could fill in where needed. Suresh comments, “Both of us had to agree that someone was the right guy before he could become part of our team. Fortunately, the people we hired scaled up well, and most of the people who joined us in the early days at very low salaries continue to be with us today.”

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