Young techies quit to follow heart!!!

Source : www.economictimes.com
Dated : 06/10/2006

Big money and bigger perks notwithstanding, the IT/ITeS sector continues to be plagued with high employee burnout. While top executives taking a break at the height of their careers is not unheard of, young techies calling it quits to follow their heart and venture into different business streams is a recent trend. A case in point is IT professionals and management graduates Pallavi Gupta and Gaurav Jain who quit their cushy jobs at TCS and Wipro to start their own restaurant. Another techie with an ear for music put up his feet to turn his passion into a full-time interest.

When business and now life partners Gupta and Jain bid goodbye to IT two years ago, the idea seemed far-fetched. Compared to IT, food was considered a grungy business. The couple had no idea how to go about in the competitive, service-oriented business.

“We were clear about one thing — we wanted to be entrepreneurs as our energies were not being channelised optimally in the regular jobs,” says Gupta, director, Spring Leaf Retail. Their inclination towards a “challenging, upcoming sector where they could directly interact with customers” led them to zero on to the food business and Mast Kalandar, a restaurant chain specialising in North Indian cuisine, was born. Started in April 2005, Mast Kalandar has four outlets in Bangalore.

After spending nine years at Oracle, US, software architect Anand Adkoli decided it was about time to do his own thing. With friend Ramana Gogula, Mr Adkoli co-founded Liqwid Krystal in 1999. A Bangalore-based entity, it focuses on products and solutions for e-learning . Its CodeSaw platform is used by publishers and e-learning companies in the US and offers over 20,000 courses and 5,000 e-books .

“Most students start learning software programming from books, but the transition from books to the keyboard is never smooth. The idea behind Liqwid Krystal was to make this education more interactive,” says Adkoli. Gogula, who worked with Sybase, US, before co-founding Liqwid Krystal, has since moved on and is a full-time Hyderabad-based music director. If education and training were a priority for Mr Adkoli & Mr Gogula, alternate energy solutions found favour with Shiv Senthilvel.

After putting in 15 years in the software industry , including stints at HP and HCL, Senthilvel launched Alternate Lighting to offer turnkey solutions in alternate energy and market low-energy portable lighting products. “First, the Indian software industry wasn’t servicing the Indian market . That rankles after a while in spite of the lucrative salary. Second, I realised the importance of decentralised power generation. The way we use our resources today , there isn’t going to be anything left for the next generation,” says Senthilvel.