The Story of Dorai Thodla, So far!

Posted by Haricharan on Apr 23, 2011 in @ the Founder's Desk, Business | 10 comments

Dorai Thodla is a founder of iMorph, Inc. iMorph builds tools and provides services for gathering technology intelligence, market intelligence and industry intelligence. Dorai tweets at @dorait and blogs at http://dorai.wordpress.com.

With Dorai Thodla around, the conversation never stops. It keeps lingering on. Even hours after talking to him, it seems as if you keep hearing his voice over and over in your head. That is the impact he creates on you. Read on as Madhura Raju caught up with this “busy-boy”.

“My earliest memory is explaining how to make “Brinjal Curry” to kids who were 5 years older to me. Everybody would sit around me and I would explain the whole process to them, as I had seen my mom make it. I used to be a very talkative kid” quips Dorai Thodla.

“Ours was one big family. We were six brothers. My father was an accountant, and grandfather was a teacher, and a very strict one at that. He played a huge role in our early-formation years. He used to conduct tuitions everyday at home, and before I knew it, at the age of 5, I knew the formula for (a+b)^2. He often used to make me stand and repeat the formula in front of older kids. What he did not know (and I did not realize) was that I was merely reciting the formula from memory and did not realize its significance!”

It was his grandfather who made him lose his fear of public speaking by making him talk in front of the students who had come for tuition. It was very embarrassing at first, but then slowly he overcame his fear and was soon winning prizes in elocution competitions.

“One thing I found in life that, when you do things that people don’t expect, you get noticed. And there is a lot of joy in getting noticed. It gives you a kick”

During the entrance exam for High School, he wrote a complex poem on Ramayana that described the entire epic in just 6 verses in Telugu. The teacher who read it was astonished and praised him in front of his grandfather and that is when he realized that one must do things people do not expect to thrill them.

“I enjoyed my school life.” He says it in one line. “I studied in North Madras. Life was fun. I got beaten up. Made a lot of friends. It was a rough life, but thoroughly enjoyable. I tried to avoid doing things that I hated as much as possible. I loved math, but hated social sciences. Hence my academic interests were predominantly lop-sided.” A small setback during one of the NCC inspections in school made him very conscious of failure. But he quickly learned from them.

“Somebody has to dream something big. Something really big. Feasibility and non-feasibility do not matter at the time of dreaming. Feasible ideas will come back again if they are really feasible.”

“I used to read a lot of Sci-Fi. I had plenty of crazy ideas When I was in college. Sci-Fi is escapist, but partly futuristic. Sometimes Sci-Fi becomes reality and today Reality looks like Sci-fi.” He says with a laugh.

A casual remark by a Maths Professor pushed Dorai to solve an entire Mathematics book – three times over. “I passed PU with centum in Maths. The only person to score Centum in our college that year”

You have to be extremely good at one thing, and at least moderately good at other things. If you are extremely good at one thing, and suck at all other things, it does not help.

“During the first day in Engineering College, one of my teachers asked the class, how many got a centum in math. I stood up to realize that there was only one other person standing. I was surprised because these folks who were sitting around me were the crème-la-crème from the top colleges in the city. During Lunch, a guy came up to me and congratulated me on having scored a centum. I replied, “Wait, till see how bad my other grades were”

I avoid doing things that I loathe. Be good at what you like.

“I really wanted to be a scientist. I was excited at the concept of finding out something new and different that nobody else had done. Then I found out that it was difficult, and laborious and I was not cut out for it. I never thought of being an Entrepreneur. It happened by an accident. One enjoyable thing is that – being an Entrepreneur, you realize that you possessed some skills that you never knew you had. For eg. Creativity.I always wanted to get a PhD. I was extremely fond of mathematics. Though I studied Electronics and Telecommunications – Guided waves, and RADAR stuff, I was not really interested in it, but for the math involved in it. I was more of a planner. I planned things right down to minute. Whether I succeeded in sticking to my plan is quite another thing.” He quips.

After he finished college, Dorai  had two jobs waiting for  him with a third one came along 6 months later. A Lecturer post at Mandya College, a Research Assistant job at LRDE – eLectronics Research Defence Establishment, and a job at ECIL – Electronics Corporation of India limited.

The college job was not a very high paying one and the job was a pretty boring one. So Dorai went to Mandya, taught for half a day and then quit the job. “My first job lasted Half-A-Day” he says nonchalantly.

LRDE lasted another six months. After which Dorai joined Electronic Corporation of India Limited. His profile was running Diagnostic Tests for testing the hardware.

 

“I loved the job. I had an awesome boss, who was always on tour. I was given manuals to read – “Cover-to-Cover”. Besides, ECIL hired people from every state, so I had a big mixed crowd to interact with. I learnt a lot about Computers at the Hardware level at ECIL” Dorai recollects.

Not many people would remember their first achievement at work – He does – “Developing various utilities for paper tape.” The stint with ECIL lasted 2.5 years from 1972 to 1974. Following this, Dorai was offered a job at the Bombay Stock Exchange. He was the only guy who knew how to use software to test hardware, and after making a couple of things work by only twisting and turning a couple of switches (stuff that he had been working on for more than 2 years now) – “..They thought I was some kind of genius and hired me at double the salary – 1400 Rs.”, says Dorai with a tad of Modesty. He worked there for 1.5 years, writing assembly language and then looked for more challenging jobs.

Dorai joined Hinditron Computers who were dealing with the supply of PDP11 from US to India. There was a need to train customers on how to use the system. So they Sent Dorai to US for 4 to learn operating systems and Post Sales Support. Teaching Operating Systems to people was the core-profile of the job and he enjoyed it immensely.

PDP11′s had a memory issue. You could have 512 KB Memory (We are talking pre-1980’s here. Even before Microsoft). But no program can have more than 64 KB of space. This was a major drawback. Dorai had found a solution to this issue and wanted to build on it. But his boss rejected the idea on the grounds that they were not a software development company. Dorai decided to change his company.

At the same time, a number of other things also happened. He had gotten married. He was looking for accommodation. He had a son and his daughter was on her way. There was no business plan in hand.

“I had built a good list of clients. Good relationships from my early days really helped. But that did not help us much. The First startup was a failure. We were struggling for money and were working too hard. We had families to support. I was looking for cash generation, whereas other guys were looking for some long term standings. Both the factions were right in hindsight, but being pulled apart in two different directions was a very difficult thing for a startup to handle. So Two years later, I had towalk out. Left my equity, clients and simply walked out. I never regretted it one moment, because I knew we were going round in circles and not getting anywhere. “

“I decided to bootstrap my second startup. Took up two consulting jobs (10 days each)and devoted the other 10 days to build products. One of the organizations where I worked as a consultant built custom products. Their best product was a Compiler Accelerator – but they were beginning to take a beating as COBOL programs were slowly becoming larger than 65 KB and compliers were glitching more often than ever. So I pitched them the idea that they could pay me 10,000 bucks and keep the technique with them. The company did exactly that, but they were not willing to risk doing the process, because – It was complex. It was risky. It was Tedious. And if they failed it would look very bad. If I failed, it wouldn’t matter much. I was a consultant after-all who was trying to do something different.”

One of the most satisfying jobs was improving the speed of a COBOL compiler in PDP-11. It was also the most remunerative. 10 days of intensive work, one month of testing and got paid 75,000 in 1983-84. It was a high risk project and failure meant not getting paid any money. That was the beginning of serious product based thinking.In 1984 Dorai met Farooque and Harish (both from U.S) who wanted to buy a bunch of machines, do the data entry in India and then export to US. However, Dorai made them understand that India is more of a software development place than a data entry place.

“Software? What Kind?” They asked.

I told them – “Any Kind”

So it was decided that a modified version of Lotus-123 would be built by Dorai and his team (which was not yet formed). Dorai did not accept a payment for his efforts. He told them, that they were willing to risk it, and he was also willing to risk it. He told them to pay him only when he jumped into it full time. “At this point, I believed I could do something.”

The organization (Franklin Computers) was sued by Apple and scrapped the product. Functionally it was complete, but six times longer (in terms of code) than Lotus 123. While doing it, Dorai had handed over another proposal – Integrated Environment – Integra.

In 1984, Harish and Dorai traveled to US to meet professors at Wharton who would act as consultants and knew what we were dealing with. Dorai was asked to go ahead and build a prototype. The first prototype failed. Dorai attended the Computers Dealers Expo – ComDex – 1984 in LasVegas. It was a very interesting experience. Dorai did a lot of research and built the prototype on MSDOS, when someone suggested, why not on UNIX? So they contacted a small organization in San Jose for a version of UNIX. The lady, who received them, was technically very sound and wanted to see a demonstration of their Relational Database. Impressed with their work they were given a free copy of UNIX and asked to come back with a complete working prototype in six months time. They improved their version in six months and were granted half-an-hour meeting in their office in California. The company brought in their Vice President half way through the meeting. Doug Michaels who also happened to be a Co founder of the company. After sometime there was a coffee break.

“We later came to know that Doug never spent this much time on anybody. As one of their own employees put it, “If he has spent so much time, then you are onto something, -Something good.”

After the coffee break, we were told to bring in our Business Partners to have a discussion. After three meetings we held in our hands a check for US$ 150,000. However it did not end very well. The company sent a guy to India to have a look at the product – during summer. “We had a lot of power cuts. There was no Build process. The guy went and reported that ‘These guys can’t deliver from India.’ So we moved to San Jose. But work pressure was enormous there. We were living away from family. Food was a problem. Not many Indians at San Jose at that point of time.”

“The product was delayed – there was a penalty clause. They continued to sell the product. And provide us with royalties, but we had lost the interest to do business with them. When negotiating the contract, we had specifically included that except for UNIX, all the other OS will be retained by us. So we built it on Windows. From 1988 – 1991 we tried different products. Microsoft sent a beta of Visual Basic for Windows. Dorai realized that this product will dramatically alter Windows application development. This was early 1990. So the team at Coromandel built a small database product and participated in the VB launch. Among about 17 products there was not a single database product. Many Microsoft product managers suggested that Coromandel should focus on building custom controls (components for VB). It got a lot of traction. Coromandel brought in an awesome development lead to build the future versions of the product and focused on marketing. Their next couple of products DbControls, Integra VDB took the company from 0 to 3 million dollars in one year

In 1998 after a lot of research and thought, we came to know that 80′s and 90′s are going to be the decade of Database and Technology that was associated with Database. Around the same time I came across a new word – XML.

At the end of 1998 I left IKON that acquired Integra to start thinking about my next startup. I discovered XML a potentially emerging technology that may be as powerful as relational databases for two decades. In 1998 after a lot of research and thought, we came to know that 80′s and 90′s are going to be the decade of Database and Technology that was associated with Database. Around the same time I came across a new word – XML. I started reading it up and found that there were more than 300 Bookmarks I had created. We wrote a small Perl script that let me know the modification done on each page.

Soon one modification in the script led to another and very soon it became popular in small circles and a useful tool. After six months we realized we had about 3000 users. We introduced many more features and then we also a put a price tag, on the “Free-till-now”. 20 pages were free. Anything more than that, the user had to pay – a nominal amount 15$ per year. A long time user called up Dorai. He wanted to white label the product and sell it to his customers. All the development work was done by iMorph Technologies Pvt Ltd at Bangalore” (InfoMinder was built by the Bangalore team). Funding for entire development happened from US. Over a period of time, iMorph evolved. They built “Tools for Information” – tools that could be used to Track companies, Market Intelligence and Industry Intelligence.

“I gave a Talk on Emerging Technology Trends in TiE. It was a huge hit. Then the Chennai Open Coffee club happened. I got a chance to meet really young enthusiastic people there. I realized that there was a need to bring Geeks and entrepreneurs together,  we decided with TiE management to start a Startup SIG”.

Chennai Geeks is more of a Two-three speakers involving themselves in in-depth serious discussions. Nerd Dinner was another hit, he said” A person who believed in the wonders what unconferences can do.

“I detest the model where there is only one person who talks and others listen. There must be place for experts to give talks. But that must happen with a lot more interaction. We wanted to come up with an ideal place where all the techies and entrepreneurs can come and meet up. Startup Centre has brought in its own Charter and stuff. Now we can proudly say that there are two really good places in Chennai for entrepreneurs and geeks – ThoughtWorks and TheStartupCentre.

Your Role Model? “My grandfather. A person who read the morning newspaper cover to cover and gave least importance to money” So what about entrepreneurs?

Ideas are just starting points. Ideas breed/trigger other ideas. From a lot of ideas come a few good ideas. To have a good idea you need hundreds of ideas. To have a great idea, you need hundreds of good ideas.

The kind of companies that we must aim to produce is where everybody does everything. Everybody dirties their hands in marketing. Everybody does coding. Everybody makes cold calls. A compact, tightly-knit organization where everybody dabbles in everything in the beginning. Once the company grows we can have more specialized duties.

Technology is only important to the extent to which it can be used. Application technology is more important than the technology itself. We need to know technology to see what it can accomplish. If you really want to become an entrepreneur, you need to figure out, how you can make it useful to people, and solve problems that they face.

Entrepreneurship is more about identifying problems.

“You need to love technology. You create technologies that do not exist and when you introduce them to people, there is the WoW factor. Take Touch Computing. Nobody would have thought of it even 10 years back. Today kids and senior citizens operate iPads and iPhones. No keyboards, No mouse, One touch and Magic. “

Businesses may not know technology. Entrepreneurs should act as bridges. Find people with problems. See how technology solves these problems and then deliver them the solution.