I first saw Sekar at Proto.in. He opened up the event with his talk ‘How to Bootstrap your business without a VC‘ that won him instant admirers. He was supposed to be the second speaker but the first speaker did not turn up and hence Sekar stepped in. And what an impression he made on the audience. He spoke out of experience. After all, he has helped bootstrap three companies and he should know.
Sekar isn’t a smooth talker. He doesn’t sway you by suave English. But what he does best is be brutally honest and speak from the heart.
After the event, we stepped off from the noisy auditorium to one of IIT class rooms to record this interview. Sekar knew the place well and helped choose a quiet room. After all, IIT was where he spent 6 years of his student life doing both his bachelors and masters.
Sekar Vembu is now the founder & CEO of Vembu Technologies, a company that focuses on the online storage backup market.
Sekar is a serial entrepreneur with over 11 years of experience in the IT industry. He was a co-founder, the CTO and a Business Unit head for AdventNet, a leading player in the network management domain, albeit better known these days for the ZOHO suite of products. He had helped AdventNet grow to a 300-person organization without raising any venture capital funding.
After AdventNet, he founded SwissSQL, a database migration solution that helps save over 90 percent of the migration effort and over 80 percent of the costs typically involved in database migration projects; SwissSQL was later acquired by AdventNet in 2004. Thereafter, Sekar founded Vembu Technologies and has played the pivotal role in growing the company to its current position.
If you are reading this via a feed reader, you can listen to the interview here.
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You’ll know by listening to this podcast with Rajan, the guy who helps organize Mobile Mondays in Bangalore.
Can’t wait?
OK. Here’s a quick synopsis.
Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influencers who meet up on Monday evenings over coffee or beer to network and share ideas, best practices and trends on mobile technologies. There are many city chapters and people get together to network and learn from each other.
In this podcast, Rajan, who runs a mobile company himself, talks about the history of Mobile Mondays and how this global concept was born. He also talks about what happens during MobileMonday meetings. And, finally, why Monday of all days?!
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In the year 2000, KB Chandrasekhar reaped $350 million when he sold his company Exodus communications. The timing could not be more perfect because a few months later, the dotcom bust happened and the company ran into bankruptcy under the new owner.
So, when the whole industry was down, Chandra walked out a rich man.
I met that man yesterday in person to have a conversation. You can listen to the conversation in the podcast above.
Exodus was no ordinary company. At one time, over 90% of the World’s Internet traffic was passing through Exodus’ backbones.
Currently, Chandra is co-founder, CEO and chairman of the board of Jamcracker. He has also invested in over 20 companies, the prominent of them are e4e and Aztec.
His career as a high-technology entrepreneur has spanned Exodus Communications, Fouress Inc., Rolta India, Ltd and Wipro.
The podcast interview traces this true blue Chennaite’s growth from his college days to the high profile successful global IT entrepreneur that he is now.
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This short 5 minute video shows you life inside Google’s Mountainview office. I’ve read so much about Google’s way of life that I didn’t find anything new. But if you haven’t looked inside their office before, this is good watch.
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Jamison Young is a full-time musician who has refused to sign up with big record labels. Instead, he believes in giving away his music for free using Creative Commons, and that has surprisingly helped him sell more records.
Now, this may sound contradictory but Jamison says that by giving away his music free as downloads, it vastly increases the number of people who listen to his music and they in turn refer to their friends. This spreads word about the album and quite a few of them buy the album off the store shelves. He says the money he makes this way is higher than the pittance that big record labels give him. This is actually a good technique to give a fighting chance against the more established artists.
Jamison has written, sung, produced and marketed his own album, called ‘Shifting Sands of the Blue Car’, the music for which is freely available for download on his website and at MySpace.
Jamison is an Australian now living in Europe. Over the past year, he has performed in Australia, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Thailand, Switzerland and the U.S.
Jamison launched a new project called ‘Hungry Artists Feed Hungry People‘, with portion of the sale proceeds going to help poor people in third world countries.
This is one of the more interesting podcast interviews I have done. If you are reading this in a feed reader, here is the link to the podcast.
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Email:Kiruba @ Kiruba.com
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