A short story, a tall order & Vijay Rayapati
Life handed him the short end of the stick since childhood. The intrepid boy, though, converted it into a long hockey stick, dribbled past countless odds and kept scoring goals. Meet Vijay Rayapati, who has been living his entrepreneurial dream and is now set to play a long innings with Atomicwork.
It was a class act. “I refused,” recalls Vijay Rayapati. Back in the 90s, the young boy from a small village — around 400 kilometre from Bengaluru — was adamant on the point of getting enrolled in class 4. Unfortunately, all the schools in Sangareddy near Hyderabad were equally rigid in their decision and offered the lad a seat in class 1.
The reason was genuinely and officially weird. Vijay, whose concerned aunt brought him from the Riverside village to Hyderabad so that the boy could move away from a small temple school and complete formal education in a city institution, didn’t have any valid and legally accepted piece of paper that the schools were looking for. The child lacked school certificate and mark sheets, and nothing to prove that he had completed education till class 3. Now the raw deal, and the ordeal, was not acceptable to the young boy who rebelled for the right cause.
The drama continued. Somebody suggested that Vijay should clear Class VII examination, get a certificate from the government which then used to conduct the public examination, and then take the certificate and get admission in a school. The child did, miraculously cleared the exams, and joined class VIII. “I was the youngest in the class,” recounts Vijay, who goes on to talk about the flip side of sitting along with the big boys. “I also happened to be the shortest,” he says.
The problem of being small triggered a long ordeal. Vijay started getting bullied by the grown-up boys, and even the girls. The young boy again rebelled, refused to be cowed down, and started skipping classes. With no friends in the class, library and lab turned out to be his willing companions. “I used to spend a lot of time there,” he says. “Studying hard and scoring high was the only way to make friends,” he smiles.
Getting Bullied, Inch by Inch
The ritual — bullying, studying and making friends — continued for a few years. And for all these years, our gritty boy just had one prayer and a solo dream: to become taller. “I just wanted to be like 5.6” or more,” says Vijay, who finished higher education by topping his schooling, got nudged by his parents and friends to abandon his childhood dream of getting into the military, and the backbencher landed up at an engineering college in Hyderabad.
A change of place, educational institution and year didn’t change one thing, though. Bullying continued in the first year. “I was shorter in my class,” he shares his agony. There was another issue. Vijay, whose primary mode of learning was Telugu, was confronted with an alien language: English. “First year was terrible,” he says. But something beautiful happened as well. A pep talk by his mother made him realise his hidden strengths. “We came to Karnataka from Andhra, and we learned Kannada. You too can learn English,” she counselled her son. The magic worked.
There was another short magical spell around the corner. In the First year, the grateful lord had mercy on the poor lad who finally gained height, and eventually learnt the English by Second year to rise from being among the lowest in his class to being amongst the top few. Vijay was now officially out of the tall shadow which had been haunting him since the school days. He completed his college, and the engineering grad landed a job at TCS.
The adult, though, had a spooky beginning to his professional career. After three months, he was sent to Kolkata to work on a project, and in another three months, he had enough of IT Services and the geeky world. A friend suggested that the techie should relocate to Bengaluru, the young man got exposed to the fledgling startup revolution in the Silicon Valley of India, and Vijay now started nursing a dream of becoming an entrepreneur.
Well, anybody can become a founder. Right? This is what our brave young man thought. Along with his friends, he started Amnigos in January 2007. Focused on online food delivery, listing site for restaurant reviews and analytics solutions for F&B businesses, Vijay ran the venture till February 2009. The business bombed, the first-time founder exhausted all his savings — he had made more than decent money by doing part-time gigs during his college, as well as undertaking lucrative freelance work after the college — and landed in heavy debt.
Dream, Nightmare & A Break
The financial strain started taking a toll. Returning a personal loan looked like a steep mountain to climb, a ballooning credit card bill which was used to pay for office expenses started to torment, and the guilt of not being able to send money to parents for over six months in a row started weighing heavily on his conscience. Vijay’s dream of entrepreneurship was dying a painful death, and optimism made way for pessimism. The first-generation founder jumped to a hasty conclusion: ‘Entrepreneurship is not for me.’
The employer now became an employee. Vijay joined Gizapage Network, a social platform between brands and communities, and worked as CTO till March 2011. The next stop happened to be Kuliza where he worked as CTO till February 2013. And two years later, he was back on the entrepreneurial crease, and started Minjar.
The second innings was supposed to start on a different note. After all, there was rich learning from the maiden failure. Vijay lists out a few of the big ones he learnt from the first stint. He starts with the basic, and the most obvious one to miss, one to begin with. “We never had a formal mentor,” he says, adding that being street-smart is no substitute for having a seasoned guide. “We moved from our initial idea to a new ideas without conviction,” he says, underlining his second lesson. The third one came from not having the right team. “It’s always great to have somebody with an entrepreneurial mindset rather than someone who thinks like an employee,” he says. Another mistake was a misplaced sense of mission. “Gates did it, Ambani did it, Jobs did it…I thought I too could do it,” he says, explaining his thought process.
Well, nothing wrong in having such a clarity of thought. But there was something missing. Vijay explains. “They had a passion, and I had a desire,” he says. Just having a desire to be an entrepreneur, he underlines, without being possessed by a matching intensity of passion is no good. Last, but not the least, learning was the need to be fully committed to the cause. “Entrepreneurship is not a distance education course where you can do the job and earn a degree side by side,” he says. A founder, he says, has to be 100% committed, focused and passionate.
Comeback and The Fightback
In April 2013, Vijay started Minjar by beefing up his armoury. He added all ammunition which he lacked during Amnigos. To be fair to the serial founder, the beginning was indeed refreshing. The bootstrapped venture soon decided to raise money. There were some suitors to be sure. But there was a small problem. Most of them wanted an unrealistic pound of flesh. “How could I part with 40% of the stake for some peanut amount,” he says. The repetitive pattern — small loan and meaty stake — disillusioned the entrepreneur who decided to stay bootstrapped, and fund the expenses by again resorting to consulting gigs until Blume Ventures decided to back Minjar with a seed cheque in 2017.
This time, the move worked. The company grew, Vijay raised some money from friends and angels, and Minjar started making a mark in the world of cloud. Interestingly, every passing quarter and year brought in a new set of suitors who wanted to buy the company. And Vijay kept on declining the offers, which ranged from a low of $3 million to a high of $10 million. In fact, Vijay flirted with an offer of $18 million. “Nah, I asked for $20 million, and they insisted on $18,” he says. The deal, understandably, didn’t happen.
The good times, naturally, didn’t last forever. Sometime in 2015, Minjar hit a rough patch. While Vijay raised a big loan, his cofounder mortgaged his house to manage the finances. To make matters worse, a good portion of employees left as some of the divisions had to be shuttered, and the CFO threatened to quit. “She sent a resignation letter underlining that the company won’t survive,” he says. The problem, he explains, originated in excessive money spent by Minjar in building a wide suite of products. “I was branded as a mad guy who was running the company,” he recalls.
Everything looked gloomy. Hope turned into despair. And the second innings too was alarmingly sliding on the path which took Amnigos to a dead end. Something, though, didn’t change. It was the steely resolve of the entrepreneur who was determined to script a different ending. “I refused to quit,” says Vijay. Over the next few months, he slogged hard, rejigged the strategy and steadied the rocking ship. In 2018, opportunity again came knocking. Nutanix wanted to buy the company, and Vijay was quick to spot a meeting of minds and a bigger home for Minjar. The rest, as they say, is history.
Last June, Vijay was back to doing what he does best: starting again. He started Atomicwork, a venture which helps companies automate internal operations and simplify the service delivery complexity. “But can he decode the complexity of entrepreneurship for budding and aspiring founders,” I ask the serial entrepreneur. He smiles and obliges. “Talent, coupled with patience and perseverance, leads to success,” he says, adding that anybody possessing these three qualities will eventually attract luck. “Be humble, do good, and your karma will take care of you,” he says. Life, he adds, might come up with innovative ways to bully you, but don’t get bullied. “The long and short of my life is that I didn’t give up,” he says.
No wonder, Vijay has stayed true to his name: victory. More power and glory to such entrepreneurs.
