At 70, most people who have made their name and money tend to their gardens and do good with their charitable foundations. Ashok Soota, uniquely, while doing both, still finds the motivation and energy to launch and build new companies. What makes a man, who has been there and done that, want to again don the entrepreneurial hat well past the retirement age? An amused Soota quotes Bill Gates. "I actually read it in a paper, yours may be, where Gates said, 'If I had had a finishing post in mind, I would have long since gone past it'."
Another powerful reason was that Soota left MindTree, the company he co-founded with great fanfare in 1999, last year. He will not discuss why but admits that "it's unusual for a guy who started the company to leave it. And I agree there must have been something unusual that happened that made me leave. Because one doesn't want to be negative, I choose to say I left for personal reasons. I kept the team together for 11 years, now I don't want to be part of it".
He launched Happiest Minds because he "felt there was still something exciting, something new to do. The nice thing about it is that it gives me an opportunity to express and bring to life my personal philosophy with its focus on happiness".
Happiness is a subject Soota's passionate about and quotes Aristotle about the overall purpose of human existence being happiness. The company's mission statement reads, 'Happiest people, happiest customers'.
Soota argues that you can run happy companies. "Research on happiness shows that even when you focus on it, it leads to happiness." At Happiest Minds, meetings start with people remembering what they have to be grateful about.
In the year that it has been in business, Happiest Minds has built a portfolio of 25 clients, 500 employees and nine offices. The $45 million raised from Canaan Partners, Intel Capital and Soota is expected to see the company through to IPO by 2018. Unless, of course, it goes for an acquisition. Soota's clear he wants Happiest Minds to be a public company because "that's how you get across the quality of your governance".
If you wonder whether there's a need for another IT services company, Soota will argue that, "In the last decade, India has not produced another IT company. There are a few niche players. If you say change is opportunity, now there is much more than internet. There are web 2.0 companies. There's cloud, social media, mobility, unified communications, big data and analytics. The essence of our strategy is simple. Focus on the change, because that's were the budgets, the needs are, that's where you can help people transform businesses."
Does he still pound the pavement to get the business as he's the company's USP?
"I don't do anything on a day-to-day operations level except in terms of leveraging my own relationships. I love meeting customers, so I leverage those relations. I do keep in touch with the market. That might taper off in a year or two because, obviously, nobody brings in the relations that I do at the moment. It's more like making calls to meet old friends," he says.
Soota admits that "MindTree was probably 10 times harder than doing Wipro because, by then, you were already surrounded by giant players. In the years of growing Wipro, the market was growing 60-70% annually. Also, the time for creating another Wipro or Infosys was over. So, you aimed to create a great value organization, which is what we set out to do, achieved and are proud of. MindTree's IPO was one of the most successful ever done in the Indian markets in theIT services industry."
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