One day when I was surfing in internet, this
TOI’s article came across to me which excite my interest.
Founder: Pallav
Nadhani
Founded in 2001, in Kolkata, when Nadhani was 16
Business: Charting products. Nandhani had begun by writing a charting component
using Macromedia Flash, which enabled animation and interactivity in charts. He
also wrote articles detailing this work for a technology publication that got
him $1,500. "That became the seed capital for my company," he says.
His biggest learning has been that customers do not look for features, they
look for benefits. The company has been profitable from day one. Barring some
advertising in technology magazines in the US and Europe, marketing has been
through free online options and customer recommendations.
Customers: 18,000 customers, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel,
IBM
Revenue: $4.5 million in 2010-11. Winner of the Deloitte Fast 50 India 2009
award and Nasscom's emerging company 2009 award.
I have read many entrepreneurs’ story but
this one excites and encourages me more. This FusionCharts is one of those rare
success stories wherein a 16 year old Pallav Nadhani, bored of Microsoft Excel,
thought creating a better charting solution and came up with FusionCharts.
FusionCharts,
a company that provides graphs and charts for over 18,000 customers and 375,000
developers across 110 countries including a majority of the Fortune 500
companies, including Google, Weather.com, Facebook, and NASA. Now
it is become a multimillion dollar company. And Pallav did all this from India
and from within India; from Kolkata!
In order to know about Pallav(the founder of
Fusionchart), I got this interview of Pallav with Joseph Ajilore( Founder of YHP | Your Hidden Potential) which acknowledge me about his background and how he
started the company and also about some of the advantages/disadvantages to/not
start a business at an early age, some
excerpts are here:
Hi Pallav, thanks for taking
the time to do this interview with me, how are you doing today?
Very well, thank you.
Can you give us some background
information about yourself?
I am a techie who now dons the
hat of a CEO and an angel investor. I was born in Bhagalpur, a small town in
India and then shifted to Kolkata (a metro city) when I was almost 15. My
father was running a web design business in Kolkata. I worked with him for few
quarters and picked up valuable lessons in client interaction, web designing
and tools of the trade. Later, I did my Masters in Computer Science from
University of Edinburgh. We just opened another office in Bangalore, and now
I’m based out of here.
Tell us about a bit about
FusionCharts and how did the idea came about?
When I was working for my
father’s web design company, I came across this site ASPToday.com that used to
pay a good amount of money to authors for writing innovative articles. That
sparked in me the idea to write an article for them. During those days, I had
to prepare charts in Microsoft Excel for my school work – and after doing web
design, I found these charts very boring and dull. And since I had been working
with Macromedia Flash (Adobe Flash now), I started exploring how to marry that
to business data and to create better charts for web.
After a few weeks of coding, I
made an animated and interactive charting system, which was very crude. But, in
all naivety, I wrote an article on that and it got published. I got $1,500 from
that (and another article that I subsequently wrote for ASPToday.com itself).
That was my seed capital for the business, and also the start of the
entrepreneurial journey. Developers who read that article liked it and kept on
asking for modifications and enhancements and this is when I realized that a
product could be created out of it.
What were you doing before you
started FusionCharts?
I was in high school.
Starting up the company, what
would you say was your most difficult process and how did you overcome it?
Coming from technology
background, dealing with people was the most difficult part. I had no hiring
experience or expertise in HR policies. Plus, my expectations from employees
were always over the board, as I expected them to work like me. Learning how to
delegate important things also took me time. Gradually, I realized my follies
and started working on it – and am still working.
Tell me about your experience
in the University, did you think it helped prepare you for the real world or
should i say corporate world? How would you describe your experience?
It was something that I wanted
to do for a long time – more of a personal dream. I learned more about life in
general than academics. For the first time, I was living all by myself – doing
everything that is required. Living in India, you get used to a comfortable
life with maids, helpers, chauffeurs and office boys. That period made me
realize the importance of time management. Plus, the cultural experience was
invaluable.
What do you do for fun?
Traveling, poker and a lot of
reading.
Let’s go back a bit to when you
were 17 starting a business, what would you say were the advantages and
disadvantages of starting a business at such an early age?
Nothing to lose. If you start
early and fail, you came out a much wiser person.
Others easily forgive mistakes that you make early.
Since you have never worked, you have no idea of baselines (or
benchmarks). As such, you bring a fresh
perspective and always try and improvise it (because you always feel
that what you’re doing is not up to the mark).
Early pocket money, that gives you freedom to do what you want.
Disadvantages:
Potential employees and
customers might not take you very seriously. You’ve to be really good to prove otherwise
to them.
Lack of people skills. Not having enough knowledge on how
corporations work, people behave, policies & frameworks operate.
I have always seen
Competition everywhere, it is a fight in which throats will be slit and blood
will flow. Okay, you get the drift. We always had to be a step ahead and make
sure they had no idea what we were up to. Then someone sensible wrote: sleep
with your competition.
But one unique quality I have learn in
search of about Fusionchart and Pallav which this company & Pallav had in
their that is: You should respect your
competitors, try to be friends with them outside of work, and look at ways of
collaborating with them to increase the market rather than chipping away at
each other's market share.
And this thoughts of them I
gather from reading the following situation of them which occurs once in their
journey.
At FusionCharts, they pioneered interactive
charting in Adobe Flash. People loved the richness and fluid beauty of Adobe
Flash and they got to 15,000 customers selling just that. Then the iPad came
along and Steve Jobs decided it was not going to support Flash. JavaScript and
HTML5 were the future.
Anyone who has ever built a product knows that a
change of platform takes months, if not years. They thought they did not have
that much time to spare. So they decided to collaborate with a new player
(competitor of fusionchart) who offered them simple but effective JavaScript
charting, and built on that. Since they (competitor of fusionchart) were new,
they knew they could use the money that was offering by the company. And then
they both win. And their JavaScript solution was much better and become much
popular.
With this I can say that the
competitor-cum-friend keeps us on our toes. Sleeping with your competition can
do the same for you. It's safer than you imagine.
But he
couldn’t have achieve this success without a supporting team and a ‘supporting
team’, he did have! I got information about his 4 of the earliest employees and
about their journey is following and they had all one strong thing in common:
They all believed in Pallav and shared the same dream. This says a lot about
the leader at the helm and the ideals of a company. Read on to find out from
these ordinary men about their extra-ordinary journey with FusionCharts.
Nilanjan Roy Chowdhary, Senior ActionScript
Developer Nilanjan Nilanjan, the first employee of FusionCharts is a completely
self-learnt programmer. Having no formal education in engineering, Nilanjan
rented a computer to explore under the hood and from that, he assembled his own
machine. Learning stuff on it, he started out with a job where he was trudging
along but his true calling came when he read a mail from FusionCharts inviting
him for an interview. He thought it’s an overseas company because for him the
website had an international look so he was thrilled to get a call. And he was even
more surprised when he found out that the company was Indian, and that too,
Kolkata. Pouncing on the opportunity, Nilanjan worked on the first thing
FusionCharts had to offer- 3D Pie Charts. With FusionCharts for more than half
a decade now, Nilanjan has been with Pallav throughout the journey and has seen
the whole roller coaster journey. Now he advises people to join a startup, he believes
‘It’s tough but a startup job will open up immense opportunities. If you have
the courage, attitude and will, join a startup and you’ll reap very sweet fruits.’
Shamasis Shamasis Bhattacharya, JavaScript
Architect Post his graduation, Shamasis had a corporate offer on which he was
pondering over. He also did freelancing jobs but at the right time, he landed
up with an offer from FusionCharts. The year was 2008 and FusionCharts was just
a 4 member team. This made him interested to work with them. In every interview
of his he say “Pallav had this fanatic attention to detail which I shared with
him,”, and this is what made Shamasis confident about FusionCharts and it has
been the best decision he ever made he believes. Shamasis was responsible for
bringing in JavaScript charting to FusionCharts as previously, it was all in
Flash. Working in a startup he believes, ‘You can’t work in a startup if you
think of it as a company. It is your company!’
Sudipto Choudhury, Head of Implementation Sudipto,
an MA in literature, Sudipto is a glib computer geek. Fond of computers since
school, he started playing around with codes since Grade 7 and the magazine PC
Quest was his companion. As happens in many cases, he was studying something and
his interest lay elsewhere. FusionCharts gave him the freedom to pursue his
dream. Sudipto joined as a junior technical writer but having immense technical
ability, FusionCharts found its perfect match. He developed the Google Gadget
for FusionCharts and become the head of implementation. Sudipto indulges in a
lot of research, exploring new horizons, manages content and does release
management as well. Sudipto is also involved deeply in the hiring process at
FusionCharts and the most important thing he looks for is passion. Now he also
advises people to join a startup, he believes ‘Working for a startup will keep
the flame burning in you. You’ll keep on learning and that is the best thing
that can happen to a human.’
Sumantra Sengupta, Creative Head Sumantra
Sumantra has been the one man creative army for FusionCharts ever since he
joined back in 2006. Sumantra had a lot of experience in the ‘services’ side
but this was the first time he delved into product. From a very small company
with a functional site to something that has scaled globally with a great
reputation, Sumantra has thoroughly enjoyed the journey. They use to work till
3 or 4 in the night to get the release out of a product. There is one specific
moment Sumantra distinctly remembers and mention everywhere that FusionCharts
had to demo in Germany and unfortunately but Sumantra couldn’t make it there
but he designed all the creatives from Kolkata without having a look at the
venue and at the end, it all worked out! Such and many more incidents is what
keeps Sumantra going and is a huge protagonist of the sense of unity that the
FusionChart team has and suggests every work culture to develop this.
This all want to
share about the company, FUSIONCHART which I learn about them.
Official Site of FusionCharts
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