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| Edited By: Praveena Sharma |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 18, 2018, 02:24 AM IST
He may cringe at any comparison of his new venture with mid-sized IT services firm MindTree Ltd, but there is no denying that Ashok Soota’s Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt Ltd bears an uncanny resemblance to the company he has just stepped down from.
From the use of the word Mind to the choice of service lines and being consulting-heavy to desperately trying to find a niche for itself, the former MindTree chairman’s entrepreneurial venture is not very different from MindTree.
He may cringe at any comparison of his new venture with mid-sized IT services firm MindTree Ltd, but there is no denying that Ashok Soota’s Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt Ltd bears an uncanny resemblance to the company he has just stepped down from.
From the use of the word Mind to the choice of service lines and being consulting-heavy to desperately trying to find a niche for itself, the former MindTree chairman’s entrepreneurial venture is not very different from MindTree.
It also clears any doubt one may have had on the reason for his sudden exit in January this year.
“It is obvious he fell out with other co-founders of MindTree. Why else would he part ways (with them) to enter into same business with same business model (as MindTree)? It is very clear there were differences on how to run the company,” said an industry observer, who did not want to be named.
On Tuesday, Soota announced the establishment of his new company, which is expected to be launched shortly after he has tied up funding from venture capital funds (VCFs) and gradual divestment of his 11% stake in MindTree.
“I’ve just begun the process of talking to VCs (venture capitalists). I expect that it will take 4-8 weeks to wrap that up. It will take a little while before I decide to liquidate my own stocks to contribute my own share of funding. Till that is done, I will fund it (the venture) myself because those are not particularly large requirements,” he said.
Soota said he has intentionally opted for VC funding as opposed to private equity funding because he did not want to scale up inorganically in the initial phase of setting up the company. “There were private equity firms who were ready to fund acquisitions of existing companies, but I want to first lay a strong cultural foundation (for Happiest Minds) before looking at acquisitions to scale up,” he said.
And as Soota breaks away from MindTree, he is using his learning from experiences at the company to “break a new path.”
“In everything there is a learning experience. Very clearly I am looking at how do I break a new path here. In that context, I would like to create an organisation which has the bandwidth and capability to address multiple business lines and multiple geographies,” he said.
The ex-CEO of the third-largest tech company, Wipro, has set an ambitious target of reaching $100 million in less than six financial years. He would also be looking at listings on stock exchanges. Though, he did not give details on how much he would be raising for Happiest Minds, he said, “It will be larger than the other IT services companies have ever done in the past.”
He said his company would offer services including information technology and product services, remote infrastructure management, testing and consulting.
On the technology side, Soota said his company would look at emerging technology like mobility, social customer relationship management, cloud, unified computing and analytics.
“If you could bring all of this together to take to your customers, you will offer very rich set of solutions which were not feasible in the past with older technology,” he said.
Soota said since non-compete and non-solicit clauses have been dropped from his severance agreement, he was free to operate in businesses similar to MindTree and hire its employees for his venture.
