Madhav Sheth MADE IN INDIA

The founder and CEO of NxtQuantum on why building a homegrown OS was a strategic decision, and betting that India-made smartphones can loosen China's iron grip on the market

- Leslie D'Monte

Even a few minutes with Madhav Sheth, 45, founder and CEO of NxtQuantum Shift Technologies, is enough to see he's no archetypal tech entrepreneur. For one, he sees himself less as a technologist and more as a businessman. "You don't need to be a techie to build a tech company—you can always hire the right people," he says. Too much obsession with the product, he warns, makes you forget the user. His mantra: 20% technical, 30% financial and 50% business mindset. Then there are his quirks. He likes to call his motorcycle a "gadget".

Unconventional, yes—and that defines Sheth, who is betting that NxtQuantum's India-made smartphones, bundled with a homegrown operating system, can loosen China's iron grip on the market.

It's a tall order even for someone who knows the market well, but then Sheth has never taken the beaten path. His father was a banker and his brother followed the same path. The divergence, Sheth insists, was deliberate. "I never wanted to be a banker—there's no point in creating wealth for someone else," he says. With NxtQuantum, he is determined to create it for himself—"and for India".

He focuses sharply on the business side, but Sheth's love for technology also runs deep. As a boy, he was hooked on video games, especially tennis, on his Atari console. "I broke four or five joysticks trying to perfect my shots," he laughs. He was just as intrigued by how cassettes drove visuals on screen—his first glimpse into how machines processed input. He later also "learnt to code".

Financial constraints pushed Sheth to pursue a commerce degree at St Xavier's College, Mumbai, in 1998, helping him sharpen his business instinct. While working part-time at Archies Gallery to pay for his studies, he saw how a 100 instant SMS pack could disrupt greeting cards that took days to be delivered. "That's when I realised tech can wipe out entire industries," he says.