By Sundeep Misra
Co-founder & CEO of VMC Technologies
French scholar Romain Rolland said,“If there is on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.” Similarly I had a dream for myself, a dream to start a business of my own, an organisation of values, ethics and culture.
Living in New York for more than 15 years of my life and working with giant companies like Goldman Sachs left me with very little time for myself to think of a new venture. Being a vice president and a key architect behind product developments, it was not possible for me to plan out a business module and take risks of starting a venture in India. However, it is rightly said, when there is a will, there is always a way. Our team from New York was interviewing for a position in Bangalore, but we were unable to find a suitable candidate for the role. And it so happened that the position and job role was similar to mine, in fact
a tad bigger than that.
A simple yet effective suggestion of a transfer from my senior team opened up my opportunity to come to India. Followed by a unanimous decision with my wife who always wanted to return to her home land as well, we finally decided that we must give it a shot and explore a new India and what business prospects I could possibly look at. Though we always had the option of returning to the US if nothing worked at all.
When I came to Bangalore in 2007, to my amazement, I saw a very different city when I had come here the last time. The city has grown bigger with many roads, buildings and, needless to say, much population and pollution. We started adapting to our new lives. As far as my children were concerned, they got into an international school so that they do not find much difference because there were students from diverse backgrounds from all over the world. We lived in a community which looked and felt like US. But the truth is, children from a younger age are more adaptable to new environments than adults, which made it easy for my sons to get acclimatised.
At a point of time when I had left India, subscribing and getting a new land phone connection itself would take months. But upon my coming back, I noticed, there were no single person who did not have a mobile phone. I thought to myself, India has transformed technologically indeed and it is also growing fast in terms of communications. In the normal course of life I had to call numbers advertised or any customer care for support and not even for a single time was I connected to the right person or department. I finally identified a problem which made me develop a simple solution for businesses to keep easy track of their day-to-day communications with their customers. I developed the solution on my own and set up a small team to help me execute my idea and talk to a few business people. I was struck with another surprise when I realised that businesses are undeniably in search for solutions to their problems. I decided to quit my job after a brief period. And that is how my journey began from being an ex Vice President of Goldman Sachs in New York, living in a country which is so unusual than India, acknowledge being a citizen of a country I served to and then finally coming back to basics that my heart always yearned for; India.
