inspiring article
RAM YADAV
article from times of india ,
In 2000, when he was 14 years old, Suhas Gopinath would pass an
internet cafe every day on his way to school. He was then studying in
class 9 in the Air Force School in Bangalore. He did not have a
computer at home. His friends in school would show off their computers
and he would have this desperate urge to use the computer in the
internet cafe.
But the cafe charged Rs 100 for an hour, and Gopinath received just Rs
15 a month as pocket money from his father who was a scientist in the
armed forces.
So he struck a deal with the cafe owner. He said he would run the cafe
between 1 pm and 4 pm when the owner closed it to go home for lunch
and rest (Gopinath's classes would be over by 12.30 pm). In return, he
asked for use of a computer. The cafe owner agreed.
"That was my first deal and the best deal of my life," says Gopinath.
With the computer in the cafe, he developed such expertise in internet
technologies that he went on to start a web design company called
Globals the same year, and was celebrated as the youngest CEO in the
world. In 2007, the European Parliament and International Association
for Human Values conferred on him with a 'Young Achiever Award'. In
2008, he was invited to represent the World Bank's ICT (information
and communication technology) Leadership Roundtable to foster ICT
skills in students in Africa, and as part of that, he has worked on IT
solutions in countries like Uganda and Nigeria.
Over the past few years, he has developed an ERP (enterprise resource
planning) product for educational institutions that is currently being
used by 150 schools in India and overseas. Gopinath declines to talk
about his revenues, but the company last week received venture funding
from Encore Operating Partners, Mauritius, and Commonwealth Education
Trust, UK.
Ask him about the challenges he's faced, and he tells you that his age
has always been his biggest challenge.
His early initiatives, such as the deal with the internet cafe owner
and the web design work, had to be done on the sly, without his
parents' knowledge. On August 1, 2000, when he started his company,
his parents were far from thrilled.
"In March that year, I had flunked my Math internal test, and my
mother was shocked. I told her even Bill Gates had not completed his
education. My mother was not convinced. I was from a non-business
south Indian community, and education was the first priority. You
became an entrepreneur as a last resort, only because you had not got
the education required." He joined an engineering course but dropped
out in the 5th semester because his company work led to an attendance
shortage. His parents were upset, said he wouldn't be able to get
married if he didn't have a degree.
His age did not allow him to start his company in India (you need to
be 18 for that). So he registered it in the US with the help of a
friend there. An American company declined to work with him saying
they felt insecure working with someone who "may not even have a
moustache". His age did not allow him to sign certain agreements. His
age put off people who he wanted to recruit, many of who were twice
his age. "Even ministers and bureaucrats are reluctant to deal with
someone who is no more than their son's age," says Gopinath, who is 25
now and still carries his boyish looks.
But help first came from the internet cafe owner, who introduced
Gopinath to his NRI friends in the US. "It was the dotcom boom days
and many of these Indians had gone there to build websites, and they
would outsource some of the work to me."
In 2006, when he was 20, he registered a company in India. By then he
had realized that the opportunity in web designing was limited as
these were becoming automated. So he turned to education ERP that
could help school administrators and teachers manage everything from
admissions to class schedules. "I found that those like SAP and Oracle
did not have something for the education sector."
His pilot project was in his own Air Force school. More recently, he
has transformed the product into what is known as
software-as-a-service. Schools can pay for the software on a monthly
basis, depending on usage, which makes it enormously more attractive
than buying a software license for several lakhs of rupees. "With this
we can potentially have many more schools adopting the software," says
Gopinath.
From TIMES OF INDIA JULY 20, 2011
THANKS TO ALL
RAM YADAV