Underdogs turn the tide

HOW THREE MIDDLE-CLASS ENGINEERS PROVED THAT SOMETIMES THE BIGGEST ADVANTAGES COME FROM HAVING NOTHING TO LOSE

- ANEES HUSSAIN

"SOME DAYS THERE was no food on the table" was dinner-time reality for Pavan Guntupalli during his childhood. But his parents, like most middle-class Indian families, scraped together for education despite facing crushing financial pressures. Both his siblings became doctors. He got into IIT Kharagpur. The family had bet everything on education to provide escape velocity.

That seemingly makes his decision at 22 to quit Samsung—a plum software engineering job in South Korea working on the Galaxy S2, the company's flagship smartphone at the time—seem utterly irresponsible. Guntupalli says he walked away "on a whim" as he thought not taking a risk is not a good idea for an Indian youth.

What followed was seven years of expensive education in the mechanics of failure—real estate ventures that collapsed; tile manufacturing that burned through savings; export businesses that went nowhere; a mining attempt that struck nothing and a marketing agency that flopped. "I had burned my hands honestly royally."

Throughout this parade of failures, one thing remained constant: Aravind Sanka. They had been inseparable since boarding school.

The two friends had decided they wanted to create an impact and build a company of their own. What followed was two years of joblessness. The third member of their eventual founding team, Rishikesh SR, entered the picture during this wilderness period. They met at a conference and eventually got close.