RIBANDAR TALKS
23rd June, 2012
RAIT, Software Engineer. Rediff’s earliest employee. DBSIS, first foot forward. Oxford, MBA Grad. Printo, CEO. GIM, Ribandar Talks Enter Manish Sharma.

“Business is pickle. So marry well”, asserted Manish Sharma, and what followed was one of the most interesting and inspiring entrepreneurial journeys that anyone present in the house would have ever heard of. In an auditorium (read MPH) full of budding MBA Grads, the atmosphere was perfect for a fruitful session. Ribandar Talks’ first speaker this academic year, the tone - was set. “You don’t speak like a doctor, you must be an engineer”, said an old lady to Manish during one of his trips from San Francisco to Chicago. And yes, he was a Software Engineer from the days where studies meant being either a doctor or an engineer. Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology, Mumbai is the place where he did his engineering, and perhaps, it is the place where the first seeds of Entrepreneurship were sown in a young Manish’s mind.

“All this is just ridiculous, nobody has ever started a business, been an entrepreneur, in our family”, urged Manish’s father but to no avail. DBSIS, a software company offering internet services, formed his first big foray into business management. DBSIS still exists in the form of IdeaLake, run by his partner, although Manish left it long back to move to the Silicon Valley, in the US. It is here where he started a product firm which turned out to be a disaster and made him lose all the revenues that he had generated through IdeaLake. “Nobody wants to get into the train while its stationary, but as soon as it starts moving, you find everyone trying to get in”, said Manish. He was talking about the initial capital generation hassles that he had been through while starting Printo. With a requirement of over two crores, Manish still found himself stuck on 70lakhs. Six