Its nice to be recognised for the things that you do, be it at work, play or wherever. NASSCOM which is India's IT governing body awarded us with the prestigious "Distinguished Technology Product Company". I remember the first day quite vividly, when I joined Impulsesoft nearly 2 and a half years back. At that point we were a little over 40. I was briefed about the HR practices for about half an hour. Then taken to my seat in the basement of this quaint house, where I was given a chunk of hardware. I was given deadlines on the first day itself and got down and dirty with it right there and then. Vidhya told me, "The aim is to bring this thing to life. There will be a lot of new things along the way that none of us have laid our hands on. So you are totally responsible for this. We can guide you but can't spoon feed you." At first I was a little bit scared but slowly got a hold of all the device drivers, bootloaders, application stuff required to bring it to life. That was just the beginning. Worked on some real good innovative products since then. As a team we have climbed a few mountains that others thought could never be scaled. We have built stuff from scratch, including the hardware for the products which was done by our hardware team. We (I especially) have made a millions mistakes along the way. I still make a million mistakes :-) but I get to learn a lot along the way. We have come a long way, have a long way to go.
Its a fact that less than 95% of startups survive. And for product companies its even harder. First you come up with something new and innovative, then you build it including the h/w, device drivers, right to the application level stuff. You learn whatever you have to get the job done. After that you throw the product on the wall. A very few of them stick, very very few. I've seen some real innovative products that have not seen the light of day. Some cause they are ahead of their time and some cause of one tiny little loophole. But thats part of the game. You have to keep at it, keep churning out those ideas which finally metamorphise into something. Some of them make money, some don't. But some of them give you this warm fuzzy feeling.
We are now about 55 heads strong. Along the way we have been ranked amongst the top 10 startups of India, then the top 3 innovative Indian networking companies, and now this. One of the products I've worked on has also been featured as the "Gadget of the Week" by Time Magazine. It sure takes a bucket full of tears and an ocean of sweat to get a successful/innovative/trend setting product out the door. Its been a roller-coaster ride so far with its share of lows and highs. But the few highs more than compensate for the lows. I'm hungry for more :-)
Hungry kya ???
PS: I'm also known as the unofficial HR and PR person of the company :-)
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