Tell us about RippleHire – your journey so far…
We help companies automate their talent sourcing by leveraging their employee pool.
We spent our first year working with the ecosystem getting feedback and crowdsourcing problems on hiring. Only then did we begin our sales process and that too with the top global brands, so that we get the right folks to get the product experience and results right.
The journey has been challenging and exhilarating – full of the regular highs and lows that every entrepreneurial journey has, along with the crazy experiences and insights that come with building a global company.
What challenges did you face during the course? Any learnings from that?
It was initially tough for us to go after brands like Adobe, McAfee, Capgemini. Convincing them to be among your initial customers was not easy. People love social proof and we will be eternally grateful to our first set of customers who have co-created this innovation with us and helped provide the social proof.
If I were to do one thing differently, I would focus directly on global customers.
Do you think that getting access to/finding investors is difficult in India?
I don’t think getting access to investors in India is difficult at all. We have always believed that investment is a by-product of building a good scalable business. Our focus as a team has been about building a product that adds value to our customers (the real proof came through when they paid).
I always recommend startups to not focus on building a business for investors but for customers. Do take the inputs that the investors give you on the space and the approach. Factor that in. However, build the business to add value to customers.
Our approach has meant that
In a recent article in ET, Mohandas Pai and I suggested that if India does not produce enough product companies, our economy will not be sustainable in the future. The data is compelling. To quote from that article, “Boeing and Airbus alone generate almost as much profit as all global airlines put together. Pfizer’s profits are more than those of the top 100 hospitals in the US. Cisco’s profits are more than those of all European mobile operators. Microsoft generates more profit than those of top 20 pureplay global IT services firms.While Indigo is a very well run airline, being a Boeing creates far larger value.”
Indian entrepreneurs and businesses can be world-scale and world-class. We have demonstrated that convincingly in services. Airtel, Jet, Indigo, Apollo Hospitals, Fortis Healthcare, TCS & Infosys, etc. are fine examples of companies that are respected across the globe. There is no reason why we cannot create world-scale and world-class product companies in India. The environment is conducive for entrepreneurs to now think ‘products.’
We created iSPIRT as a non-profit think tank with the aim of accelerating the software product eco-system in India. Since our inception in 2013, iSPIRT has focused on solving tough problems that will foster software product companies in India. Making M&A happen is one such problem. iSPIRT’s M&A Connect Program has made a big difference there. The last one-year has changed that perception of India as just a software services destination, and we have now generated early but enthusiastic interest in the international markets for our software products.
Some of that change in outlook started becoming apparent when, in January 2014,
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