[Music] so we were a bunch of students from iit madras who were very good at you know this technology of computer vision and machine learning and we were really passionate about how we can use whatever we were good at uh to solve some real problems for people [Music] around that time we started working with several professors from iit madras and we have taken up projects for southern railways itc and mrf this gave us the confidence to start our own ai company we had a choice to make do we work on enterprise problems like we had done before or do we build a consumer app which would need us to raise some money we decided to build a consumer app because if we got it right then you right away can take that to thousands and maybe millions of people and fortunately we ended up raising more than a million dollars in seed round of funding when i joined the team the first idea that we were working on is a photo sharing app where you give a dump of photos and it does smart categorization for you and i think in a month's time not kidding in a month's time google photos launched an update i think in a period of uh two years so we would have tried out at least like 10 different ideas and every single idea because we were hitting flat on the ground so at one point of time we had to do all kinds of gimmicks to get you know more installs and to retain people all kinds of stickers and face masks and things like that we were just working towards how to make people spend more and more time on your app we had built a technology and we are trying to force it into people's lives we could never gain traction for the consumer apps we were building and we also had a very less amount of money in the bank club we were facing investor pressure to sort of show them returns and we had acquisition office and the future was not clear right what do you do [Music] it was the december 18th 19th kind of a time frame in 2016 where we logged all of us in that office we asked each of us the same question what will you stand for for the next say 20 30 years of your life that even if you don't get paid you will be willing to fight for that problem [Music] there were about 13 of us then and each of us came up with different problem statements that we find relevant from how healthcare is broken how education system is broken so we went back to our investors told them uh so long you know we've been burning your money doing consumer applications but no traction we were very honest with our investors because they have always always always been very accommodative we shared with them that i think it's time for us to change tracks we need to work on problems that are more fundamental problems such as healthcare problems such as education rural employment something that will mean something in people's life so they gave us a very genuine insight right so on one hand uh as a startup you have maybe six to one year of cash left in the bank whereas on the other hand if you know someone has to work on any of these fundamental problems right it requires maybe a decade or so to even create a dent in any of these areas uh so they essentially said you know as a startup you're not suited to work on any of these fundamental problems this is when we sought out advice we went and spoke to a lot of people uh sridhara who happens to be founder of zoho heard us out clearly and he said you can't just have intent to solve these problems you also need to have other elements going along with it you need to have time you need to be pouring in effort you need to have the capability to do it all of this is tied down by you being an independent entity that is running on its own and sustainable and a profit making entity [Music] said great what do we do he said survive make 500 thousand dollars happen in the first year like great 500 000 looks like a challenge to go after we had no clue how we will make to the 500k target but now that we were clear why each dollar in that 500k matters we just put our heart out the team just gave everything they got and we got to the 500k that year in fact next year we doubled it so why does this origin story matter as we are scaling every other day a new teammate is joining us they are competent they bring tremendous amount of energy they are very driven more importantly somewhere at some level or the other they are all connected to the purpose that we feel is bigger than each one of us we are not in survival mode as of now so there is a fabulous opportunity to work on the fundamental problems that we spoke about education healthcare rural employment there is something real that we can do right now about it and that's what is keeping the entire team driven all the hard work that we have done over years now we can possibly see something that we really wanted to see out of the hardware [Music]