I realized that writing about myself is way more difficult than writing about gadgets or philosophy. So I guess it is going to be some time until I can write about me. Some time back Professor Philip Anderson, Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship INSEAD had done a case study on Cynapse which included a short biography of me. The following is a small excerpt from the case and probably summarizes my life better than anything I have written.
REMEMBER TO PICK UP FLOWERS Apurva Roy Choudhury tapped into his telephone. With his wedding approaching on February 6, 2005, he found himself using the SyncNotes application more and more for such snippets of information. The handy little program allowed him to create and read virtual sticky notes on either his personal digital assistant or any PC he happened to be using, with a complete archive of notes available to him whether online or offline. He could even send sticky notes to and receive them from selected friends. It wasn’t exactly surprising to Choudhury that SyncNotes was so useful—after all, it had been built and was hosted by his own company, Cynapse (
http://www.cynapse.com), based in Mumbai, India. SyncNotes (
http://www.syncnotes.com) was a key element in what he hoped would be the evolution of his company from a custom programming shop to a true software product company. As he replaced his PDA in its pouch and headed back to work, he wondered whether SyncNotes would be a stepping stone on that road, or perhaps something more. Of several paths open to Cynapse, he wondered which provided the most promising route to his goal of sustaining the company through revenues from products instead of projects.
Apurva Roy Choudhury was born in Jamshedpur, India in 1979, but grew up in Mumbai after his family moved there when he was six months old. He suffered from asthma, which kept him away from many physical activities, and instead played long hours with an electro-magnetic set, designing and building devices such as burglar alarms and water pumps. As a boy, he wanted to be a scientist, but he found that he was not especially good at mathematics, and his performance in school was just above average. He recounts:
"I have always been more visual, better at building and inventing stuff. My father bought me a motor-controlled car, and I opened it up and built my own car out of it. Everyone in my family is a lawyer, doctor or engineer, so there was a lot of academic pressure at home. Since childhood, I have been a somewhat frustrated person because academics is not my cup of tea. I couldn’t prove my intellect or my knowledge. I prefer the mechanical end of things: if you show me a set of 30 gears and tell me which direction the first one rotates, I’ll tell you in a few seconds how the last one does. "
In the Indian academic system, Choudhury found it difficult to show what he could do. For example, he says, “In engineering, you are supposed to remember by heart a four-page algorithm for complex sorting and write it down. I couldn’t reproduce it as fast as required.” In his fourth standard, Choudhury’s father offered to buy his son a computer if he fared well in examinations, so for once, the boy learned everything by heart and performed well. He instantly fell in love with computers, and taught himself how to use them. Even so, he was not able to translate his skill into academic performance. “I taught seven friends of mine the Pascal language,” he recalls. “They all passed their examinations in the subject, and I failed.” Nonetheless, he felt a rapport with his computer; like his electro-magnetic set, it gave him a way to build things. He explains:
"I realized it was so easy to innovate on this platform. I’m both visual and analytical. I don't know--code is just something that happens to me. I didn't start that way; my mother is an artist, and I started off doing graphic designs with Photoshop 2.0. I used to have a band, so I did some recording on a computer. Hacking came naturally, and I became well-known as ‘Dark Error.’ I never did anything destructive though."
In 1996, Choudhury enrolled in the Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology, located in New Bombay, a 3.5 hour train ride from his home. He spent so much time hacking that he had to repeat his first year due to poor academic performance. Nonetheless, his extracurricular activities were earning him a reputation. He says:
"I did a lot of information hacking and built my first web site, called “Creative Destruction.” I wrote a white paper on denial of service attacks in 1995, not about how to bring a system down, but instead about different types of attacks and how to prevent them. Along with the paper, I put up tools I had made myself, I was pretty creative with the site’s graphics too. It gained a lot of popularity—Webfringe (
http://www.webfringe.com) used to rate the top 100 hacking sites, and I got up to #8, and the site had more daily visitors than syncnotes.com has today. "
Choudhury had a free year at home, and he became friendly with his hardware vendor. The owners were growing, and suggested that the young man start a company to build web sites for money, called WebVenture. With nobody to ask for help, Choudhury taught himself all the skills needed and spent the year building sites, principally for corporations. After a year, Choudhury returned to his engineering studies. Although he wanted to continue juggling school and work, his partners demanded that he either quit school or quit the company. Choudhury chose to leave the company, and learned a harsh entrepreneurial lesson. He recounts:
"They paid me 1000 rupees a month, less than my pocket money. I was the only person on the team—I did all the marketing, the graphics, everything. All they did was give me business cards and tell me to go meet these people and get a project. All of our proposals came from WebVenture, but it wasn’t incorporated and it didn’t have a bank account. They used their own bank account, and I didn’t know much about the transactions. Supposedly I was a partner with a one-third share, but when I quit, they didn’t give me a rupee, even though we had made a profit of about 4 million rupees, much more than what Cynapse did in its first year. Even though these people took all the money, they are probably the ones who taught me the most in business. They taught me how to manage and communicate with clients."
Choudhury kept plugging away at his engineering studies, and passed out with his degree in 2001. However, he had caught the entrepreneurial fever, and throughout his college years, he worked on the side. “My professors gave me a lot of leeway for attendance,” he recalls:
"The technology thing was starting to happen, and I was viewed by some as a boy-genius kind of guy, very much in demand. The sites I did for WebVenture were good-looking and popular, and I was seen as a geek who could build anything. Back in those days, a lot of IT companies were floated on the stock market. The father of the friend of a friend was a millionaire who owned a number of properties and companies, and he talked me into starting a PLC with him called Datasoft. He gave me some money and told me to do whatever I wanted with it while he focused on the stock market. I’m an anti-trend guy, so I said I didn’t want to do any more standard web sites; I wanted to look at applications. I stayed with Datasoft for a year and we did a lot of internet and extranet applications."
After a year, an opportunity to work with Ticket No. 1 came along, which led to the founding of what became Cynapse. Choudhury still lives in Mumbai, where today he is CEO of Cynapse.
- Philip Anderson
INSEAD Alumni Fund Chaired Professor of Entrepreneurship
Director, 3i Venturelab
Director, International Centre for Entrepreneurship