Successful Business Story:

Inspiring birth story of India’s

most celebrated software company
– Mindtree
With my experience of being into business, I can clearly tell you one thing –
every aspiring entrepreneur needs to read atleast
one inspirational successful business story before starting their own
business. With that as the basis, in this blog, I would be talking about the
making of one of the respected and celebrated IT services company of India
– Mindtree Consulting.

Subroto Bagchi – Co-Founder of

Mindtree
The first time I heard about Mindtree’s co-founder – Subroto Bagchi was in
the year 2007, when I accidentally found his book – The High Performance
Entrepreneur on one of the shelves of Sapna Book House in Gandhinagar,
Bangalore. Those were the days when entrepreneurship and business were
my fascination and anything that spoke about the subject drew my
attention. The same happened with the book and I became a big fan of
Subroto Bagchi after reading this fantastic book. I would strongly
recommend this book to anyone who is thinking of starting a company.
This book is one of those books on business that inspired me to quit my high
paying job at General Electric where I was working as a Senior Design
Engineer, to start my own coaching academy Subhash Programming
Classes. One fine day, while going through Subroto Bagchi’s blogs, I found a
26 pages pdf article, with the title “Making of Mindtree”. I quickly
downloaded it and started to read. The article contained a beautiful narration
of a successful business story . It was the journey about how 10 friends
started today’s most respected IT services company Mindtree. I quickly
archived this into my gmail for further reading. This was in the year 2009.
Since then, I have been reading this article several times just to keep myself
inspired.
It’s almost 10 years now. After a decade of teaching programming to
students, I wanted to try something different in the online space. After so
much of thinking, I decided to start my blog BusyMonk.com – to write about
successful businessmen and their stories but not completely limited to that.
As part of this blog, I wanted to write the making and success story
of Mindtree and therefore I started to go through the article once again.
Though the original article is 26 pages long, I have cut down some of the
contents to keep it crisp, neat and clear. If you are looking for a full version
of the story, a quick google search of “Making of Mindtree” will yield you a
good number of search results with the pdf to download.
Let us begin to read about the successful business story of one of the most
respected IT companies in India.

Important Note:
The “Making of the Mindtree” is told in the first person by Subroto Bagchi. In
condensed form, it was published by BusinessWorld, filmed by InfiniTV, and
aired on CNBC, IT Hour.

Mindtree – Old Logo

The Making Story:

After working for Wipro for almost a decade, in April 1998, Subroto Bagchi
moved to Lucent Technologies. Lucent wanted to set up their Bell Labs
Development Center at Bangalore. Subroto Bagchi recalls, how he had the
opportunity to work on a strategic study of the future of the Indian software
industry while at Lucent Technologies.

Subroto Bagchi was clearly able to envision the future of businesses. He

could visualize that, 21st century belongs to the those who can emerge as a
leader in the services industry especially in the information technology
sector. Given that, he felt there would be an insatiable demand for software
services all over the world and those who can give early emphasis on it can
reap the benefit of creating post-millennial software solutions company.

An idea started lingering in Subroto Bagchi’s mind about starting a value

driven software services company while in Lucent Technologies. With this
conceived idea in Subroto Bagchi’s brain’s womb, he called up his ex-
colleague N. Krishna Kumar to discuss this idea. Krishna Kumar was at that
time the chief-executive of Wipro’s electronic commerce division and had 18
years of experience in Wipro. Krishna Kumar was one of Bagchi’s colleagues
whom the latter will always look up to in terms of professionalism and work
ethics. On 17th June, 1998, Subroto Bagchi invited Krishna Kumar for lunch,
which Suborto Bagchi quotes as the life changing day for both and many
others. Because that meeting was the starting point for creation of Mindtree
– one of the successful business story of India.

N.Krishna Kumar
This was an auspicious day, especially for Krishna Kumar, as it was his son’s
birthday. By the end of the lunch, both had agreed to quit their respective
jobs after few months to start their dream company. Until then, they
decided to meet every weekend to sculpt the future of the next big thing –
a respectable software services and solutions company, whose successful
business story will inspire many more generations to come. All this being in
their respective jobs until they finalise their plan.

These weekend meetings went on for a while and during these discussions,
they clearly understood that, they needed a professional guidance from
someone who is really wiser and motivating. As Subroto Bagchi and Krishna
Kumar spent most of their years in the corporate sectors, they knew almost
everyone in the corporate world. But, they were looking for a wise and
motivating guide who can maintain confidentiality too. Yes. They were
filtering out the candidates from the vast list of professionals who came to
their mind with three parameters – wisdom, motivating and one who can
maintain confidentiality about their baby idea until it is comes out to the
world. After loads of thinking, Subroto Bagchi circled down to one person
named N.Balasubramanian who took up teaching at the prestigious IIM after
a premature retirement from Wipro.
One fine day, both Subroto Bagchi and Krishna Kumar went to meet the
professor at the IIM to discuss their ideas and take suggestions. They put
out all their doubts to the professor like how to approach investors, how
much funding to expect, which is better among renting a space or owning
one etc. After listening to such series of doubts and questions from them,
the professor suggested the duo to first write a compelling business
plan as it would give them an idea on how much money needs to be pooled
in from investors. This made sense to both Subroto Bagchi and Krishna
Kumar. At the end of their discussion, while the duo was about to leave the
office, the professor called them back and gave them a success mantra –
“underestimate the income and overestimate the expenses” – Anyone with a
little common sense would understand the power of this mantra and does
not need any explanation. Subroto Bagchi during his interview says, “When
you are about to set sail for a long and arduous journey, it is not the
promise of the wealthy or, the push of the powerful that helps you to cast
the boat. It is the first word of kindness, a simple message, an almost frail
word of detached wisdom that signals you to lift the oar”.
Because of the duo’s hectic work schedule and busy overseas assignments in
their respective companies, they had no time to get their business plan
structured. The duo were totally against using the company resources and
timings to create their successful business story. They wanted to do justice
to their employers. Meanwhile, time was just flying. They wanted the help of
more friends who believed in their dream to sketch the business plan of their
dream company.

Around this time, Subroto Bagchi had to travel to US on company(Lucent

Technologies) assignment. During this time, as fate had to do its bit,
Subroto Bagchi had to stay with one of his relative who knew Anjan Lahiri –
the man whom Subroto Bagchi knew as a smart salesman while he was in
Wipro. He had quit Wipro long back in 1989 who travelled to US for an MBA
and settled there with a successful job in Cambridge Technology Partners.
During Subroto Bagchi’s visit, Anjan insisted Subroto Bagchi to spend a
night with the family.
 Anjan Lahiri
During his stay, Bagchi discussed with Anjan about the latter’s work life with
Cambridge Technology Partners. After listening to Anjan about his awesome
work life, he questioned if Anjan would be interested to join Subroto Bagchi
and Krishna Kumar to create a truly valuable and inspiring software services
company. Anjan and his wife was very excited and gave a thumbs up even
without a second thought. Immediately, Subroto Bagchi called up Krishna
Kumar to inform him about the increased size of the team – 2 to 3. Krishna
Kumar was very happy to hear that. But, one question that kept them in the
dark was – From where do we get the money for our startup ?

With no business plan ready yet, equipped with only their personal CVs,
they approached three venture capitalists, one Indian based, another US
based and the third was Europe based. Though their personal CVs were
quite impressive for all the three VCs to encourage their ideas, the three
partners knew very well that, they definitely needed a well-structured and
well-documented business plan. Along with the business plan, the three
partners were also feeling a sense of void in between them. They felt
something or someone is missing in order to get their dream company
happen. They realised to create a successful business story for future
generations to read, it needed more strong characters. After a long thought,
they understood, their dream team needed a strong technology leader.
Both Subroto Bagchi and Krishna Kumar decides to talk to two technology
veterans they both knew very well from Wipro again. One of them was an
application expert and the other was a technology veteran. While, the
application person readily accepted to join Subroto Bagchi, Krishna Kumar
and Anjan to create a dream company, the technology expert was little
skeptical about joining the trio and asked them more than 30 questions
about the business and promised them to get back after talking to his wife.
But, much for the trio’s surprise, the application expert who had initially
agreed to join the trio, called up and conveyed his disinterest and decided to
drop off from their idea. Where as the technology veteran who was initially
skeptical about the business idea, came back to the trio with a decision to
join them and be with them in their long journey of creating a successful
company. The technology veteran was none other than the General Manager
of Wipro’s Technology Solutions – N.S.Parthasarathy – An alumni of
BITS,Pilani and IIT, Kharagpur.

N S Parthasarathy
With a strong four member team ready, they knew very well that, they were
far behind their dream as the business plan documentation wasn’t even
started. For writing the business plan, they realised, they had to take off
from their regular work, get together in a common place, discuss the
business story and write. Time was just flying. In the month of December,
as it was a Christmas season with loads of holidays in their calendar they
decided to get together in a hotel – The Park Hotel in Vizag for
their business plan preparation. As most of the founders were very well
known fraternity in the IT sector, especially in Bangalore and Mysore, they
feared the exposure of their business venture if they holed up in any of
hotels in Bangalore or Mysore or any other nearby places instead of Vizag.
That is how they chose Vizag. Anjan, decided to fly from US to Vizag
directly, where as the other three founders along with two other friends
decided to travel to Vizag on road by car. They reached the “The Park Hotel”
in Vizag in the mid night of 24th December.
On 25th December, all six friends, out of which four were confirmed
founders, one was a prospective co-founder (details revealed at the end of
this story) and the other was a common friend, started arguments,
discussion and debates passionately about creating their future company.
After a week long discussion investing almost 12 hours a day, they came up
with their first mission and vision statements. Mission statement read
as “We will deliver business enabling softwaresolutions, by creating
partnership with our customers, in a joyous environment
forourpeople”. If the mission statement is carefully read, it incorporates
 three segments – the business they do, the partnership they make, creating
a friendly and joyous environment for their employees. They had created 4
vision statements which read as follows:
 Achieve $100 Million in revenues in 5 years.
To make investors, customers and employees feel proud about associating with them.

 Establish development centers in four international locations

To build a world-class organisation to span across the world not limiting to just one or two
locations and serve customers across the globe by being closer to them.
 Create ownership through stock options at all levels in
theorganisation
To create wealth for everyone associated with the organisation.

 Commit a significant portion of our PAT to support

enhancementof primary education in the societies we work in.
To support education especially in the rural areas where government schools are ill-
maintained.

They came up with six core values on which their dream company would be
based:

1. ReduceTotal Cost of Ownership for our customers

2. Partnership is the cornerstone of our existence
3. Respect individual contribution but, valueTeamwork higher
4. Create an Organization based on learning, innovation andquality
5. Enable employees to rise to full potential and reward withwealth
creation
6. Conduct ourselves with the highest sense of integrity
They also decided to focus on two kinds of businesses:

1. Net Enabled Business

2. Application Maintenance Services
Now, after much of the discussions, they had to figure out how their future
company would stand out of the crowd among all the other big competitors.
After a final discussion, they came up with 4 differentiating factors:

1. Be known to customers as a specific domain expert

2. Be equipped with latest software tools to solve customer problems
3. Develop their own methodology to solve customer problems
4. Provide utmost quality in terms of service,
5. Continuous Innovation
6. Building a reputed and a strong brand in the IT services space
No wonder, with such a passion and dedication to achieve their dream, their
story became the widely read successful business story in India. With four
founders, a structured business plan, vision and mission statements, they
ended their initial discussion, packed up things and pulled out the cars to
come back to Bangalore with an idea of meeting venture capitalists as their
next action plan. Though they advanced their discussion of funding with
three major venture capitalists, nothing worked on their side, but they kept
their dream alive.

Kamran Ozair and Scott Staples

Meanwhile, one of the founders, Anjan insisted Subroto Bagchi to have a

word with Anjan’s colleagues Kamran Ozair and Scott Staples about their
new business plan. Kamran has a vast technology experience with several
successful projects handled at Cambridge Technology Partners. After
Bagchi’s presentation, both Kamran and Scott agreed to join in along with
others as co-founders to build a reputed company. I wonder, what could be
the power of Subroto Bagchi’s presentation ? I feel I should sit in one of his
presentations to learn how to convince people. A true businessman was in
the making.

Kalyan Banerjee and Rostow Ravanan

Subroto Bagchi also found potential in two more people who can add value
to their dream company. One was, Kalyan Bannerjee who was heading the
Human Resources Management at Wipro’s Technology Solutions. Second
was Rostow Ravanan, who had moved to Lucent Technologies to help set up
the Bell Lab Centre in Bangalore. After discussing the vision, mission
statement with the two, Subroto Bagchi could convince both Kalayan and
Rostow too to join their team as co-founders. By now, you should
understand that, a successful entrepreneur is not just the one who comes
out with an idea, but the one who also brings in people together to get the
idea executed

After a rough ride with the earlier venture capitalists, Subroto Bagchi and
Krishna Kumar decided to pitch in their idea to another venture capital firm
– Walden International, where their common friends Sudhir Sethi and Som
Das were working. They knew each other during their earlier days of working
with Wipro. They made their presentation to Som, and at the end of the
pitch, Som and Sudhiragreed that it made sense to carry the discussion
forward with another meeting with business plan emphasis only on the
financials.

Ashok Soota
When these things were unfolding here, there was one more start-up story
on its way from the board room of Wipro. Yes, one of the very close
associates of Azim Premji, the Chaiman of Wipro, Ashok Soota – the big man
of Wipro, communicated his intentions of starting something on his own to
the Chairman. Ashok Soota too had called up Som Das of Walden
International to check for funding possibilities. Ashok Soota was also the
boss of Subroto Bagchi while he was in Wipro. Som Das, after discussing
with Ashok Soota about his business plans, found there is a similarity
between Ashok’s idea and the idea of these folks led by Subroto Bagchi.
Som asked if Ashok would be open to merge the dreams.Ashok Soota did
not hesitate to say “yes”. He said, “go ahead and speak to Subroto, and ask
him to call me after he comes to India”. Som also spoke to Subroto Bagchi
about Ashok’s intention to join their dream team for which Subroto was very
happy and excited. Within minutes after this call, Som conferred
withWalden’s Chairman and got the go ahead from him. This was not a deal
to miss, they all felt.
Ashok Soota is a very well known face in the IT industry not just restricted
to Wipro, but outside too with almost two decades of vast experience. When
such a big man joins a dream team, creating a successful business
story is inevitable.
Subroto Bagchi called up Krishna Kumar to convey this information. Even
Krishna Kumar was very excited to have Ashok Soota on their dream team
and felt that would create history in the IT industry. Both Subroto Bagchi
and Krishna Kumar met Subroto Bagchi at Ashok Soota’s Bangalore
residence to pitch in the idea of an unnamed, unfunded company to make
Ashok Soota, as their Chairman. After the presentation, Ashok Soota took
few days of time to think on this. After evaluating his life script carefully,
Ashok Soota called in the duo toconvey that he would like to merge his
dream with that of the other folks led by Subroto Bagchi and agreed to
acceptChairmanship of an unnamed, unfunded start up. Subroto Bagchi
recalls, how even before they could start a business, they did a merger – the
merger of two similar thinking minds. However, Ashok’s news had to be
handled with extreme confidentiality.

As Ashok Soota is a big name in the business sector, the news of him
leaving Wipro, if handled poorly, would adversely affect Wipro’s brand image
and stock market performance. Everyone in the team agreed that the news
must be protected till Wipro identified a replacement and they also thought
that ethically, they should let Wipro make the first announcement.

Based on Ashok Soota’s suggestions, they needed tocompletely revisit the

size of their dream, redo the business plan, rethink the requisite
investment strategy and not the least, get themselves a name. The team
started getting into the execution mode slowly. They all could smell a
business success story in the making.
From the the subsequent days each of the founders were working from 7 PM
every evening to pastmidnight revising their first Vision. As sketched in the
business plan, they all aimed for a revenue target of $123 million by 2005.
Ashok also suggested to bring forward the commencement date of their
European operation. On Ashok Soota’s advice, their initial idea to build their
own building was dropped as they felt it was unnecessary. By now, the team
also started hunting for a nice name for their dream company.

While all this was happening silently, Economic Times reportedly leaked
Krishna Kumar’s news of leaving Wipro. A few journalists had understood
about Subroto’s departure from Lucent but in keeping with Lucent’s wish –
he had to stay away from them completely. However, no one could guess
that Ashok Soota was also in the picture. Even after repeated questions and
enquiries from various media channels, Ashok had to make a straight-faced
denial, even though he was very uncomfortable about it as the press had to
be handled with transparency. “But then, there are times when you do not
own the truth”, says Subroto Bagchi during an interview later. It was tough
time for the entire dream team to protect the truth from the press, but still
they kept quiet. All tough times are worth going through, as those moments
are worth sharing to people during the narration of their successful business
story which would set as an example for many younger generations to come.

The team finally zeroed in on two investors as their venture capitalists – one
an US based Walden International and one Indian based Sivan Securities
that was started by Cafe Coffee day’s founder V.G.Siddhartha. On 15 July
1999, away from media, in a non-descriptive conference room in the
basement of Gateway Hotel in Bangalore, at 9.30 pm, founders of the
unnamed company,Walden and Sivan Securities signed the agreement. It
was a fantastic occasion that underscored the power of friends coming
together. Business success, money, and attendant trappings were less
important. The entire team was happy that they had done a deal with
friends, with people who shared the same value system.

There were two things pending for the company to happen. One is the name
and the other is the logo. The team approached a California based company
that was specialised in suggesting names for companies if the intended
nature of business is given to them for a fee. The company came up with
729 names, out of which the team finalised “MindTree” as its name. The
decided to name the company “MindTree Consulting”. Now they had a
dream, they had ateam, they had a business plan and they had a Chairman
who was an icon in the industrybut no visual identity for themselves and
their company.The logo for the company was missing.

The team approached Karnataka Spastic Society, which takes care of

children with cerebral palsy. Children with cerebral palsy are often blessed
with fine minds that are trapped in a disobedient body. Some of them have
limb coordination problems, speech and hearing impairment. There is no
cure for cerebral palsy. The team let the children do the logo design for
Mindtree. The one that clearly stood out was the work of 17-year-old K.
S.Chetan. Chetan has a form of cerebral palsy that denies him coordinated
limb movement and affects his speech. But his brilliant mind overcame all
odds. In one skyward blue brush stroke, Chetan depicted boundless
imagination. He surrounded the skyward blue brush stroke with yellow dots,
pretty much like a tree in bloom. To him, the yellow dots symbolised
“bubbles of joy”. On August 18, 1999, the team presented their visual
identity to the world and a successful business story – MindTree was born
with 10 successful entrepreneurs as the co-founders.

Mindtree Founders

The 10th person whom MindTree did not mention during its press release
was S.Janakiraman(do you remember the one whom I had mentioned earlier
as the prospective co-founder ?) who was then the president of Wipro’s
global R & D. Sometime in July, as the news of Ashok’s leaving Wipro got to
the world, Jani was devastated. Janakiraman thought the world without all
the founders of MindTree in Wipro is not going to work for him and there
was no way he would stay on at Wipro. After a few rounds of discussions, it
was settled that he would be Mindtree’s tenth co-founder, a fact that could
not be made public on August 18, 1999.

Janakiraman
Source: From Subroto Bagchi’s blogs as part the
website www.mindtree.com
Mindtree’s IPO :
MindTree became a public company on 12 December 2006. It was listed on the Bombay
Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange. MindTree’s Initial Public Offering (IPO)
opened on 9 February 2007 and closed on 14 February 2007.The IPO was oversubscribed
more than 100 times. MindTree announced a new brand identity and logo, with the slogan
“Welcome to possible” on September 28, 2012.
 Mindtree New Logo

MindTree Today:
The company boasts of its employee strength as approximately 17,000+ with annual
revenue of $780+ million. The company deals in e-commerce, mobile applications, cloud
computing, digital transformation, data analytics, EAI and ERP. Minster deals with more
than 344 active clients with 43 offices in over 17 countries, as of 31 December 2017. Its
largest operations are in India and major markets are United States and Europe.

The Conclusion :
Mindtree’s story is still one among the most widely read inspirational
business success story in India. The story of Mindtree shows how intelligent
people can come together to create something of value that can be left
behind for generations to come. It is also the story of 10 successful
entrepreneurs who with a common desire worked together to achieve the
extraordinary.
This successful business story is also an example for many who wrongly
think, entrepreneurship should be necessarily started at an early age. All the
co-founders of Mindtree were in their mid-40’s when they decided to come
out of their comfort zone. As far as I have analysed, one of the primary
factor that shaped their successful business story was their vast industry
experience.

One more important learning from this successful business story is the
patience that the entire team had to make this success happen. Special
mention should be given to Subroto Bagchi for his unmatchable convincing
skills that helped all 10 co-founders come together to achieve the
extraordinary.

I would strongly recommend all wannabe entrepreneurs to follow Subroto

Bagchi’s blogs and read all his books, as I did, because, that has contributed
a lot to my work in a positive way. I wish you all the best and give me an
opportunity to write your business success story.
Please comment below about your future business plans if any, or on how
this successful business story helped you towards reaching your business
goals.

Further Reading:

[ Business Success Story Of Infosys ]