Some people have an appetite for risk. And some don?t. It?s as simple as that. When one?s professional life is going great guns and there is no need to look back, one tends to get into a certain comfort zone. Rajesh Srivathsa had enough and more going for him in his career, but yet he longed for something even greater. It is probably difficult to fathom what constitutes an entrepreneurial mind, but an ability to test unchartered territory is one sign of it.
Rajesh comes from a middle class family. His father worked at the Military College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering as a workshop officer. He had two other brothers. ?My mother?s lap was my first school; from her I learnt loving kindness, perseverance and patience. On the other hand my father was my role model for good values.?
Throughout his life, Rajesh says, he has been trying to live up to these standards set by his family. The city of Secunderabad is where he spent most of his school days. ?I recall that I was quite an introverted child, and, prone to falling sick often. It is thanks to my mother who encouraged and nurtured me, and to my high school teachers that I opened up. I feel I am now reasonably extroverted.?
Rajesh recalls that he was an average student during his middle school days. ?I recall my Math tuition teacher quite categorically stating to my mom that she would be surprised if I were to study beyond 12th Grade (a lesson in retrospect?don?t listen to what others say; do what you think you are capable of and you will almost certainly achieve it). My hobbies at that time included hiking and generally be purposeless with the only purpose of being with friends.”
He developed this ambition to crack the IIT when he was in junior college. ?Suffice to say that I did not make the list and while it crushed my morale at that time, it was a valuable lesson in humility?there are always people who are smarter than us. I was fortunate that I was given admission to NITK (at that time, KREC) close to Suratkal.?
?During my four years at KREC, while I was studious, I was never really at the top of my class. But when I realised that I did want to study further, I started preparing in earnest for the GRE. And I did do well in that exam?I scored 2370 out of 2400 placing me perhaps in the 99th percentile. And that secured for me an admission to the University of Texas at Austin.?
At UT Austin he did his Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering specialising in Signal Processing. He met his wife here. ?During my Masters, I was fortunate to be doing a research project under Dr Blankenship on mapping under-ice volcanoes in the Ross Ice Shelf in the South Pole. I accompanied one of the research expeditions to the South Pole?that experience is something that I cannot capture in words. The utter desolateness and unsurpassed beauty of Antarctica is something that still baffles my mind. That experience tempered my being?the grand awe inspiring creations of God! How little we understand or experience the depths of his creations.? He then proceeded to do his PhD from the University of Illinois.
As he neared the end of his PhD journey, he realised that while the heart was still intent on teaching, he needed more experiential knowledge. ?Hence, I decided to join the corporate world and secured a position at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre in New York. I then moved to Lucent Technologies which was using these chips to build boxes that would go into broadcast head-ends.?
?As soon as I joined Lucent, my group was spun out of Lucent with venture funding from the internal venture arm of Lucent. For all practical purposes, I found myself in a startup. While this was accidental, I soon found that I loved the thrill of being part of a ?startup?. Post this, I joined a startup in California ?Emuzed that was focused on multimedia solutions for mobile phones. The timing could not have been more impeccable?it was early 2001 just before the dot com crash and so raising capital was next to impossible!?
?I joined as the CTO of Emuzed but quickly migrated to doing sales and marketing. We had more than two dozen mobile OEM customers including 5 of the top 6 in the world by 2004; and soon we had offers for acquisition and accepted one from Flextronics.
This transaction completed by early 2005.
Flextronics had acquired several other software companies in this time period; they merged many of these and spun them out as Aricent.?
He moved back to India in mid 2006 as part of Aricent after spending about 16 years in the US. ?Post my move, I began soul searching on what I wanted to do. I realised that I was very fortunate to have moved across functional lines in my career. And my experience spanned large companies and classical startups. Around this time, I approached Nadathur S Raghavan (NSR) and his son Anand Nadathur to ask them for advice. NSR has been one of the early angels in India; supporting startups from 2000 onwards under the aegis of Nadathur Holdings and Invesments (NHIL) post his retirement from Infosys. And that was the beginning of Ojas.?
?At Ojas, we want to enable startups to build nonlinearly scalable, successful businesses. Often, startups come to us and start off by presenting excel sheets of financials. Our rejoinder to them is that financials are the effect and business is the cause. So we need to first focus on what the business is and then arrive at what the financials could be. While perhaps ambitious, our vision is to be recognised worldwide as one of the leading venture capitalists in Asia?effectively building value through enabling startups with more than just financial capital.?