Ambarish Gupta, Founder and CEO of Knowlarity - India’s largest cloud telephony service provider, gives voice to more than 15,000 customers daily. Like it is in many entrepreneurial journeys, there is much more to this scale than what is immediately apparent.

Where it all started

He completed his undergraduate studies in CS from IIT Kanpur, after which he travelled and worked in several places across the world - Europe, Australia, and the United States. In 2004, he started his own company - by his own admission, built around a great product idea - but after a year and a half of tough slog, ended up as a failed venture. He flew back to the US, where he did his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. He also notably worked as a Senior Associate at McKinsey and Co. Ambarish spent every second of his remaining bandwidth from that job onto expanding the idea which became Knowlarity, in 2009.

A failure that built success

In 2004, Ambarish embarked on his first venture. He mentions it among one of the biggest learning experiences of his life. Fresh out of college and after working for 3 years in the US, he spent a year and a half on hard, unforgiving work into making a company around a fairly solid product idea. “One of the biggest mistakes is to think that just because one can build a product implies that they can build a company,” he says. He learned a lot from this first enterprise: how to lead a team, how to manage capital, and how to sell. He learned to structure an optimal business model and how to cut his losses if it started failing. All of this formed the foundation of what Knowlarity is today.

Looking back, Ambarish says that his ‘expectations’ from the world had fallen. The ease of imagination had been squeezed out - all the romanticism of education, of reading about accidental billionaires, of familial support. In dreams one can ‘be what they want to be’ but Ambarish realized that if one has to DO something, then they must engage with reality. This was one of the most major takeaways of his life - he learned the difference between planning and execution. This too has found its place in the air that Knowlaritans breathe - the ‘Violent Execution Culture’ is known to anyone associated with the company, and visible to all in the office.

Knowlarity: “the safest billion-dollar idea”

Ambarish has variously described his following job, as a consultant, in McKinsey and Co., as ‘comfortable’ and ‘unrealistic’. It is here where his pledge to never start a company again broke. His jolt of confidence from McKinsey’s culture was something that gave him back his energy, some of the ‘fluff’, and also the money a startup was sure to require. His enthusiasm for founding his own enterprise gained ground once more.

It was while working for McKinsey he came up with the idea of Knowlarity. At the time, the Indian market had just opened into consumer telephony. Ambarish had the foresight to predict a market for business telephony that had not yet been developed. He derived the idea for it based on the macro problems in the market of the time - he predicted that any business looking to contact individual customers through their cell phones was bound to look for an industry or software that did it for them. The more he could lower the cost, the better. He refers to it as the ‘safest billion-dollar idea’ that he could come up with.

Surfing on a tidal wave

Ambarish’s vision allowed him to bend many factors to his benefit. He had the experience of starting a company before, as well as working in some of the biggest corporations of the world. Ambarish designed a Business-to-Business service model for this venture; it safeguarded his revenue more than he would have from selling Knowlarity’s products to individual customers. He made the decision to ride the telecom wave overtaking India at the time - which was performing at full-tilt. He even took the precaution of testing the product’s ‘sellability’ with a few potential customers before actually designing it - making his intended market as safe and sure as he possibly could. Time also was on his side, which enabled his company to nitro-boost itself to the top, before other competitors could hit the market.

Ambarish’s second great learning about enterprises was therefore around this: developing an innovative idea in a rising industry. Companies that do not correlate to society’s larger pain points of that specific time, according to him, have greater chances of failing. He calls them ‘popcorn ideas’ - business that pop out of nowhere and are always on their own. He thought that one of the smartest ways to make sure a company doesn’t drop into losses immediately is to make it about something bigger than itself. Ambarish built a dam where the water was flowing already, reckoning that even if something went wrong, the overall economic wave in the sector would ride it up and allow the funds to float. He found a macro driver that was creating opportunities that did not exist even as little as 5 years previously, and invented something within that scope.

Knowlarity operated its products for the first time in elections in Orissa, India. By the end of 2009, the company was in business. And the rest, as they say, is history.

In conclusion

Ambarish’s success story may not be filled with dramatic movie-worthy sequences of fighting for one’s childhood dreams, or rising to glory under the tutelage of some lonesome godlike mentor, or any other such fairytale dream. It is consists of simple, straightforward hard work. It is built on frustration, innovation, and persistence. His constant back and forth was what made it all finally pay off. Ambarish is still building, still leading, and learning from his team of committed Knowlaritans