Printing a gilt-edged calling card

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: From starting a web solutions company to setting up a printing retail chain—not many would dare to take that leap decidedly fraught with deadly slips. But then, entrepreneur and die-hard risk-taker Manish Sharma, co-founder and chief executive officer, Printo Document Services Pvt Ltd, did just that. Sharma, 35, who did BE in computer sciences from Mumbai University in 1995, was part of a launch team that set up the site, rediffmail.com. “We launched it in January 1996,” he says.

It was not long before he launched a web solutions firm in February 1996, gripped as he were by the speed with which the world around him was changing at that time. It was named the Web Solutions Pvt Ltd. “I started it with minimal finance and two partners. One partner provided a warehouse in Bombay, where we started the firm, while another provided a laptop. My father bought me a computer and I started out with an investment of Rs 10,000,” he says.

In the beginning, job-seekers refused to join his company once they found that Sharma’s office was actually a warehouse. “In the end, we hired one person and we just went out and met potential customers—we had shelter, and food was not a problem.” After plenty of legwork, Sharma’s made a kill—a contract to put Indian Oil Corporation on intranet in Mumbai in 1996.

He was lucky that software was at a nascent stage at the time. A little over a year later, Web Solutions hit pay dirt in the real sense of the term—the firm bagged a $1-million contract from the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai to manage their back-end and front-end operations.

Gaining from strength to strength, the company hired between 120 and 130 employees within a year of inception, and in fiscal 1997-1998, Web Solutions earned $ 1 million in revenue by doing business in India. “At that time, IDC, the global provider of market intelligence on information technology, ranked us as the top company for web solutions in India. We wanted to add more value and more product-oriented solutions. I had age on my side then. During my degree course, I had specialised in artificial intelligence.”