Indian entrepreneurs' stories span 2 continents

Each of the Puget Sound area's leading Indian entrepreneurs has a unique story, but in some ways they share the hallmarks of a classic tale of overcoming adversity.

Digvijay Chauhan

Digvijay Chauhan arrived in Seattle in 1991 with a degree in electronic engineering, two years' experience as a software engineer and $4,000 in cash. He had enrolled at Seattle University, one of the few institutions then offering a master's degree in software engineering, but had no family connections in the area.

"I landed in Seattle with the realization that I had to use that sum of money to finance something in the order of $15,000, including residence cost," he recalled the day after having spent the night on the couch of his business, Xpertsite.com, soon to be Askme.com.

He went to see one of his uncle's friends, who had a carpet shop in Seattle, and walked away with tips on where to get some cheap kitchen utensils.

"I went to the Goodwill store and bought all kinds of kitchen things," he said. Even with utensils, though, he still didn't know how to cook, and eating out was too expensive.

"I went through all kinds of budgeting, including trying to survive on a cereal called Total," said Chauhan, who frequently sustained himself on the $1-a-slice pizza sold by Pagliacci on Broadway.

A part-time job at Microsoft eased the financial burden, but left him little free time.

By 1993, he had converted a part-time job with Microsoft to a full-time position, and ultimately became a lead developer and a group manager.

He quit Microsoft to start Xpertsite.com with fellow Microsoft alum Ramesh Parmeswaran and Udai Shekawat, a business and marketing specialist.

Deepak Amin

For Deepak Amin, his first trip by plane was the one that delivered him to New York, minus his luggage.

"So here I was in New York, $20 in my pocket, no bags and no ride," Amin said. "I picked up the phone, called my cousins, took directions and took the bus to their place. (It) was quite fun actually."

Amin studied computer science and engineering at India Institute of Technology in Bombay before completing a master's degree in computer science at the University of Rhode Island.

"I couldn't believe that the temperature of minus 40 would exist," he said with a laugh.

Transoceanic flights are common for Amin now. In 1996, after a six-year career with Microsoft, he quit to form a company, Indicus, in Bombay. Setting up the company in Bombay proved to be a huge logistical challenge, but the company did receive contract work to help write software from Microsoft.

Although contract software writing brought in money, Amin saw yet greater potential in the Internet. He had his programmers in Bombay develop a suite of services for small businesses, which became the catalyst for forming vJungle.com in May.

Indicus still operates in India, but the driving force for the company is now in Bellevue, where Amin keeps a sleeping bag and cereal boxes stacked in his office.

Raghav Kher

When Raghav Kher left India in 1982 to pursue a fellowship at the University of Missouri, he never intended to stay in the U.S.

"I told my folks I'll get my degree and be back," he said. "They laughed and said, `We'll see.' They knew better than me."

Kher, who arrived in Missouri with a degree in mechanical engineering from Bangalore University, received master's degrees in engineering and computer science in 2 1/2 years.

Out of school, he got a job with a start-up in a Detroit suburb while pursuing an MBA. In 1991, he stepped in to fill an interview appointment that a friend couldn't keep. The employer? Microsoft.

Kher wasn't interested. "In those days, the Microsoft salary was quite a lot less than the industry average," he recalled. But Microsoft's recruiters persisted, and he finally accepted, even though he feared the company's stock had peaked.

After seven years there, he quit, deciding to take it easy. But his wife had a list of household projects she wanted him to do. His experience calling plumbers, painters and other trades convinced him the Internet would be more efficient for obtaining quotes.

That spawned Imandi.com, derived from the Hindi word "mandi," which means bazaar. The Web site matches a range of tradespeople and service providers with customers, who seek bids on anything from painting a house to obtaining a divorce.

Imandi.com completed its first round of venture-capital financing - $15 million - in October, and has enrolled 168,000 merchants in its service. The Redmond-based company has 50 employees, and 20 others in India working under contract at a company run by a friend.

Pradeep Singh

Like Amin and Kher, Pradeep Singh has a foot in two continents. But it was a bicycle accident while training for the Seattle-to-Portland ride that got him thinking about the old country.

The accident triggered memories of a previous head injury Singh had sustained in a mountaineering accident at age 17 in India. Somehow it all connected: His goal became to persuade Microsoft to set up an operation in India.

The Redmond company wasn't ready, but gave Singh a contract to set up his own business and nine months to get everything in place for a service center.

Singh left Microsoft in June 1994 after almost nine years and headed to Bangalore to set up a company he named Aditi. By February 1996, the company had 110 employees devoted to answering questions about Microsoft products posted on a CompuServe forum.

Singh, an avid outdoorsman, was skiing that year when he got news via a pay phone at the Mount Hood lodge that Microsoft had canceled the forum - and the Aditi contract.

The timing could not have been worse. Singh had just made job offers to 60 students. For the rest of the year, Aditi burned up $70,000 a month in wages while Singh worked on a strategy.

Aditi survived, eventually becoming the basis for Talisma, the Kirkland-based operation that has won contracts for customer-service projects from a clutch of leading high-tech companies.

Talisma, now the parent of Aditi, has 600 employees evenly split between Kirkland and Bangalore. There are also Aditi programmers working on the Microsoft campus in a program Singh developed to make his company appeal to young Indian programmers.

Naveen Jain

The stock performance of InfoSpace.com has put Naveen Jain into the business pages of newspapers across the country. Since taking the Redmond-based Internet portal and content company public in late 1998, Jain has become one of the fastest-rising chief executive officers in high tech. He's also become the best known of the former Microsoft employees who immigrated to the U.S. from India.

Jain, who obtained an industrial engineering degree and an MBA from St. Xavier Institute of Management, a Jesuit college near Calcutta, was recruited straight from school to work in the U.S.

Life in the U.S. began in a small New Jersey town called Frenchtown, where Jain lived in a farmhouse and worked for Burroughs.

He lasted one year - "it was not entrepreneurial enough for me" - and then moved to California to work for a company developing applications for MS-DOS, the computer operating system that kick-started Microsoft's involvement in the first IBM personal computers.

At his wife's suggestion, he called Microsoft and moved to Redmond in 1989. He worked on a range of projects, including as group manager for the Microsoft Network (MSN). He quit on impulse.

"It wasn't bad; the house was paid for, the car was paid for," said Jain.

"The biggest shock was to my oldest son. He used to say that when he grows up he wants to be like Bill Gates. Now he says he wants to run his own company."