Leather shoes, foreign stint & office timings: iMocha & its strong SaaSy brew
In 2012, two mavericks from Pune dared to question why interviews couldn’t be quantified. Over the next decade, Amit Mishra and Sujit Karpe battled a fair share of odds, embraced a series of quick learnings, and built iMocha into a global skills intelligence and assessment platform which is based out of Delaware and is valued over $100-million!
Pune, Maharashtra
The ballsy engineer from Pune exhibited his naivety.
“I think we should remove the CEO,” vented Amit Mishra. The greenhorn, who was just three months into his maiden job, was oblivious of the corporate trappings and idiosyncrasies. “Trust me, that’s the best thing to do,” he exulted.
In a town hall meeting, attended by around 400 employees, there was a common question posed for all. “Tell us how we can improve the efficiency and transparency of the company,” the top management asked. The apparently innocuous question was followed by an assuring promise. “The suggestions made would be taken professionally and not personally,” was the hallowed commitment. For the next 30 seconds, there was pin-drop silence. Then Mishra valiantly raised his hand, dished out half-a-dozen reasons why the CEO must be shown the door, and hogged the limelight. “I became immensely popular. After all, I had the courage to speak the truth,” he says.
The next month, the hero got to know the difference between courage and bravado. Mishra was put on PIP (performance improvement plan), a weapon usually abused by corporates to discipline the so-called rogue employees. One of his colleagues told him that he was paying the price for his heroics. Mishra was stunned. “Arey lekin apne ko to bola tha ki bindaas bolo, aur koi personally nahin lenge (But we were told to be forthright in our views and it won’t be taken personally),” he wondered.
In fact, the prospect of losing job was devastating for Mishra. Born and brought up in the slums of Amravati, around 645 kilometre from Mumbai, Mishra had a tough upbringing. His father, a social activist and teacher, instilled the values of honesty and courage, the young lad was enrolled in municipal school where the mode of instruction was Marathi. “English was an alien language for me till class 10th,” he says. “I didn’t even know how to pronounce ‘thank you’ properly,” he adds. The young boy hustled, studied hard and fell in love with math and science. In fact, he topped his school, and completed his engineering from Amravati University in 2000. “I got to know about IIT in my second year,” he laughs.
Barf ka gola, and the shoe pinches!
Back in Pune, the young engineering grad saw the writing on the wall. The shock of a truncated corporate career and the embarrassment of being chucked out of the job was so huge that Mishra vowed to shun corporate life. “Barf ka gola lagaate hain (let me get into slush-making business),” he decided, and took a bold step to materialise his adventurous idea. He spotted a strategic corner on FC Road in Pune, shelled out Rs 1,500 to buy that spot, and bought a cart for Rs 1,000. Mishra was all set to turn into an entrepreneur. The only thing missing was to inform his family. So he goes back to Amravati to break the news.
A few years later, Mishra was mulling to break free from a different kind of corporate mould. After a stint at IBM, the son of the soil joined another IT multinational. He thought, the transition would be seamless as the nature of the job remained the same. Well, he was not-so-right in his assumption. There were three stark differences.
First, Mishra had to report to office on time. For somebody who had been used to work-from-home culture, a rigid office timing was an anathema. “Teen late mark ka matlab half day. Kya Mazak hai (Three late marks and your half day salary is gone. What a joke!),” he wondered. Second, the new job entailed an overseas stint as well. Mishra was not comfortable with the idea. Third, the IT executive was supposed to come to office in formal wear. The thought of putting on a leather shoe pinched badly. “Shoes pehenna tha, foreign jaana tha, time pe aana tha…maine socha kaon karega ye sab. Apna kaam chalu karte hain,” he says.
The fear of shoes, the phobia of going overseas, and the distress of a regimental office life gave birth to an entrepreneur. Mishra joined hands with Sujit Karpe, his friend and former colleague, to roll out his maiden venture which had strong traces of IBM, at least in its name. “We named the new venture RBM (Radix Business Models),” laughs Mishra. The IT services company started operations towards the beginning of January 2005, over the next few years gathered steam, and quickly managed to expand operations in the Middle East and Europe.
Over the next five years, RBM grew at a fast clip. By 2010, the bootstrapped company profitably scaled up to around $1.5 million in revenue, and then the founders did something unthinkable. They sold the company. Reason was interesting. “Product banana ka keeda tha. Lekin services main thein (We itched to make products, but we were into the business of services),” says Mishra, who had an engineering division of around 8–10 people who used to make products. “But we never sold them,” he smiles. For two more years, Mishra and his cofounder stayed with RBM, enabled a smooth transition and finally exited the company in August 2012.
Moonlight, Sunlight & a lot happens over coffee
Now the gutsy founders wanted to get their hands dirty in products’ business. “Sunlight chahiye tha (we wanted sunlight),” says Mishra, who realised that the first stint as an entrepreneur with RBM was all about ‘moonlight’. Though it was valuable and gained immense scale, it lacked impact aka ‘sunlight.’
The friends brainstormed over the next few months. While Sujeet joined an IT services company as a founding member, Mishra was yet to find his mojo zone. Then one balmy day, they found ample ‘sunlight.’ The venue was a rooftop cafeteria, the mavericks ordered two steaming cups of mocha, and started brewing their next entrepreneurial gig. Then suddenly, they realised there was a yawning gap in the interview market.
The problem was simple. There was no objective and effective tool to assess the skills and competence of the candidates appearing for the interviews. The job seekers, Mishra explains, were judged primarily on the basis of their resume, which at best masked the real picture, and at worst was a primitive way to find out the competence required for the job. During their job hunt, the duo too had experienced the stupidity and mockery of the ineptitude of interviews as a medium and the plight of the interviewers and the ones who were getting assessed. “Chal interview phodte hain (let’s crack the interview puzzle),” said Mishra, who thought that ‘Interview Mocha’ was the best name for the new venture. His partner-in-crime agreed, and decided to pursue it on a part-time basis. “That’s how Interview Mocha was born,” says Karpe.
The next two years, a lot was supposed to happen over coffee. Unfortunately, it didn’t. The founders hoped to gallop, but Interview Mocha trudged, and the friends were still hunting elusively for any meaningful income. On personal front, Mishra took a huge gambit by mortgaging his house. “I got Rs 55 lakh, and gave 35 lakh to my wife to take care of the household expenses for three years,” says Mishra, who wanted to explore the space. Finally, a Microsoft accelerator programme towards the end of 2014 and early 2015 turned out to be a turning point. Ravi Narayan, who was back then the global director of the Microsoft accelerator in India and Southeast Asia, actually brought sunlight into the lives of the entrepreneurs.
The insight was incisive. Entrepreneurs, he underlined, often come across struggles where they are pushed to make choices based on either ego or spirit. Anything, Narayan stressed, that stops a founder from making progress and taking right decision is an ego. Spirit, on the other hand, encourages to make the right decisions. In tricky situations, one must keep ego aside and let spirit take the driving seat. There was, though, another critical takeaway for Mishra. “Every unsuccessful product company has a product. And every successful product company has a customer,” he says, alluding to one of the lessons imparted by Narayan.
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy (CTO-in-residence at Microsoft Accelerator), too left an imprint on the minds of the founders. “If iMocha is Arjuna, then he (Prasanna) happens to be our Krishna,” says Karpe. In March 2017, he started Upekkha, and the founders enrolled in May for four months. The learnings were priceless. “He taught us value SaaS. He taught us how to reach our first million dollar by staying bootstrapped,” he adds. Mishra shares his part of the takeaway. “From GTM to product roadmap, Prasanna has always been there as a guiding light,” he says.
Over the next leg of the journey, Mishra and Karpe started focusing on customers, Interview Mocha rolled out its website in 2015, and over the next three years, it made decent progress. By 2018, it had around 600 customers across 50 countries, was clocking a MRR of $15k, and was profitable. Well, Mishra was justified in his assessment that Mocha was loaded with enough caffeine. Really? Read on what happened next…
SaaS Guru, and timely gyan
“So are you really elated with the journey so far,” the cofounders were asked in one of the SaaS startup events in 2018. “Something hit me,” recalls Mishra. So far, the founder recounts, Interview Mocha had a satisfactory growth. But the question to ask was: had it realised its potential? Another burning question was: had the SaaS business achieved enough scale to enter into its next leg of growth? Mishra found answers at a Nasscom conclave. Shekhar Kirani of Accel was addressing a huge gathering of entrepreneurs, and the SaaS guru captivated the audience with his priceless inputs. He had five searing questions for the founders. Is it a big market in which you are operating? Are you present in a differentiated category? Does the segment have high frequency of usage? Is the duration of consumption also long enough? And lastly, is there enough headroom for growth?
Mishra and his team went back to the drawing board, and reassessed their strategy. Over the next three years, by 2020, the MRR jumped from $15k to $83k, and the company did away with ‘Interview’ in its name and retained just ‘i’. The move was to underline that Interview Mocha was now much more than interviews, and had morphed into world’s largest AI-powered digital skills assessment platform. Two years later, the founders ended their bootstrapped journey when they raised $14 million in Series A round of funding led by Eight Roads Ventures in January 2022. iMocha was then valued at $100 million! The dream run is on.
Meanwhile, Mishra is happy chasing his dream. “A businessman chases realities and an entrepreneur chases dream,” he says. “I am an entrepreneur, and I will never give up my chase.” His partner shares the secret sauce behind the meteoric rise of iMocha. “Keep asking questions, and you will find the answers” he says.
And if you guys are wondering what happened to the poor CEO who we talked about in the beginning of the story, then here’s the exciting news. He was indeed fired after 14 months! Now this calls for a Mocha break 😊
