Joy engine

AN IDEA BUILT IN SPARE HOURS, WITHOUT A ROADMAP OR MANDATE, GREW INTO SOMETHING FAR BIGGER THAN ITS MAKERS IMAGINED

- ANEES HUSSAIN

BACK IN 2006, Yahoo! was bigger than Google in traffic but was slowly losing the war for talent.

Run by Hollywood executive Terry Semel, who viewed the Internet as a media channel rather than a technology platform, the company chased ad deals while Google hoarded engineers. That culture clash showed up even in an interview room in India. A Yahoo! India interviewer rejected a young Sparsh Gupta for being a mechanical engineering graduate applying for a software engineer’s role during campus placements.

Gupta tried explaining. He was passionate about computer science, had taught himself, and was heading the web development council at Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) despite not being from a computing branch. The interviewer wasn’t interested.

Almost twenty years later, Gupta is co-founder and CEO of Wingify, the company behind visual website optimiser (VWO) — one of the world’s leading A/B testing platforms serving Microsoft, Disney, World Economic Forum, UNICEF, Vodafone Group, HBO and eBay.

This story isn’t about how Gupta proved that interviewer wrong, but how he chose a different path to building products.