Coast to coast.
1) Among a lot of investment opportunities, what made you pick MobME?
Primarily four reasons in no particular order:-
I am very delighted by the phenomenal growth rate of wireless subscribers in Kerala and all over India. I feel that Wireless-based applications especially in the Mobile Media and Entertainment sector are poised for high growth. Kerala has a great opportunity to seize this growth and differentiate itself from other parts of the country.
MobME, as a company is born in Kerala and is focused on this high growth area.I felt that this has all the makings of a wonderful entrepreneurial success story born in Kerala.
Personally, I wanted to "give back" something of substance that has greater impact to my native state, Kerala. In this case my Management experience leading young energetic teams and my expertise in the Wireless Business in general was a perfect fit for what the young MobME team was looking for. I also felt that I would enjoy working with this team because I felt an instant chemistry with most of the team members. I liked their youthful passion and entrepreneurial approach. The team also understood how their peers are likely to use services such as MobShare...this was a tremendous asset.
I
felt that with some help from me on the investment front the company could
be successfully scaled for high growth, hence I decided to personally invest
in the company and join the team as their Executive Chairman. This
is an active Executive role where I get to direct the team on various strategic
and operational priorities on a day-to-day basis. I am really enjoying this
role.
2) How do you foresee MobME's growth in a competitive market in India as well as abroad? Where do you see it in the next five years?
MobMe has a set of products that are very complementary to its flagship product called MobShare. With the right level of capital infusion and focused execution of its business plan I feel that MobME could grow into a highly valuable company valued at several hundreds of million dollars within the next three to five years.......my dream and hope is that such a success story born out of Kerala would put our small state squarely in middle of the map of business success stories created by creative private-public partnerships. MobME, although a Kerala-based company, will have a global footprint with customers and operations in Asia, the middle-east, Europe and the Americas.