From Trivandrum, with love: Babu Sivadasan’s Silicon Valley journey

“My dream is to have a direct flight from San Francisco to Trivandrum”.If any other US-based Indian expat made that statement, it would invite a roll of the eyes. But not when JIFFY.ai's CEO Babu Sivadasan says it, as he has a reputation for being ahead of the curve.

• When the name Silicon Valley was still a novelty among techies in India, Babu was right there in the thick of things from 1995. Even before outsourcing became the catchword of the IT sector, he had organised a team of five in Trivandrum to develop software for US companies.
• Long before subscription became a popular business model for tech companies, Babu was toying with such ideas. His big break came when he, along with some student co-founders, launched Stamps.com.
• Within two years, the firm was listed in the US in 1999, way before any Indian CEOs rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
• Babu was tinkering with software options for financial firms long before the word “Fintech’ came into use. That path eventually led to the NYSE podium again when Envestnet went public in 2010. Babu spent 20 years building the company, whose software now handles trillions of dollars worth of assets across the world. 

And the trend continues till today. As artificial intelligence platforms were revving up, Babu too was quick off the block, and his JIFFY.ai – which offers AI-empowered intelligent automation solutions – has already raised 81 million US dollars in funding and is expanding to markets across the globe. JIFFY.ai is now on Hurun's list of Indian start-ups most likely to “go Unicorn” within the next two to four years.

But Babu says right from the time he graduated in computer science from the Trivandrum Engineering College in 1993, he faced a string of rejections.  “I used to go home and cry after getting rejected at job interviews,” he recalled during an event at the BHub in Trivandrum recently.

He says he found his groove only when he landed in California two years after an initial job took him to Bangalore. “Everywhere all I saw was energy. A bunch of college kids were trying to create great companies and I felt right at home there.”

Still, his focus was firmly locked into doing something in Trivandrum. With the salary he was earning there, Babu managed to build a team of five people by limiting his own expenses to the minimum. “I didn’t buy a car and used to walk three miles to the office. I shared an apartment with five-six people, but spent most of the time in the office.”

“My objective was to build something in the hometown back here. I love this place, though Karikkakom, where I grew up, is no longer the village it was then. Those days we had to walk a bit to catch a bus to get to the city,” he says. “The team we built had no clear idea about the business model, but we were determined to do something in the IT field.”

As the team grew in Trivandrum, Babu ended up taking three jobs to keep the backend office going, shuttling hundreds of kilometres every day. “I would work for 20 hours a day, and it would leave me burnt out. I did it for one and a half years continuously, sleeping just about four hours. I timed my drive from offices so perfectly that I managed to have my meals at the traffic light breaks,” he says.

Still, hard work alone didn't bring the benefits and led to some major disappointments, like when they tried to import cheap computers to Kerala in the mid-90s.

Babu raised funds to buy and even assemble computers and shipped 50 of them to Trivandrum, only to find them snared in the customs duty dragnet. “They imposed duty based on values formulated in the 1980s when computers were prohibitively expensive, and I ended up personally underwriting much of the loss. Later, I was told it was the biggest shipment of computers to arrive in Trivandrum in those days,” he says with a wry smile.

Back in California, the dotcom boom was building up steam, but Babu says he would often get thrown out by investors as he had no proper business plan, only ideas. Many just ignored him, and ace venture capitalist Vinod Khosla was one of the few who at least showed the courtesy to send a rejection letter, says Babu.

During those days, Babu ran into Mohan Ananda, who migrated from Kannur to the US in 1967 and became one of the top technologists in the country. Ananda became Babu’s mentor and their association led to subscription models for software.

Again, Babu says such models often failed to resonate with investors and tech companies were focused only on selling their products. But the big break came when US Postal Services bought their idea, leading to the establishment of Stamps.com, which went public within a couple of years and raised 55 million US dollars in 1998.

The success of Stamps.com allowed Babu to pursue his dreams, but not all of them turned out to be successful. He shifted his focus to exploring subscription models for different sectors, including the entertainment sector. Babu, an avid movie fan, wanted to create a subscription service for movies, but investors were not interested.

The dotcom crash of the late 1990s put an end to that dream and Babu considers it one of the biggest disappointments of his life as subscription services for movies, like Netflix, would emerge only years later.

Undaunted, he went on exploring other areas and stumbled upon financial services by chance. Babu was with a friend who was visiting a financial adviser when he noticed the expert was dealing with each client by going through stacks of files littered around the office. Software to streamline the process began to develop in his mind, and soon he was headlong into that project with the Trivandrum office writing codes.

To cut a long story short, that venture called Nectar Systems, which was working out of a rented place in Jawahar Nagar in Trivandrum, later merged into Net Asset Management and was absorbed by Envestnet in 2004. The Kerala capital became a key centre of the multimillion-dollar fintech firm, and its founder and CEO, the late Jud Bergman, travelled all the way to Trivandrum to open its own office in Kuravankonam.

Envestnet now handles assets worth trillions of dollars and is an uncrowned king in the sector. “To look back and say some of the codes of the company were written in Trivandrum gives me immense satisfaction,” says Babu.

Babu spent two decades with Envestnet in various key roles, before retiring as group president of Envestnet Retirement Solutions in 2019. But he was soon into another adventure in a field that was just beginning to bloom: artificial intelligence.

Again, he stayed ahead of the curve as he saw large-scale disruptions once AI gets incorporated into different sectors. So JIFFY.ai, while developing software, built a business model that will also help those displaced by AI-based tech by providing training and new work placements.

“We will be ruthless in disruption but will employ the profit generated in the businesses to help those displaced by our work,” the JIFFY.ai chief explains.

His interest in the future welfare of those in the IT field extends beyond AI disruptions, and he has been mentoring and guiding many young entrepreneurs in India and abroad. He guides the Trivandrum-based venture-funded startup Carestack while playing a key role on the global stage as a member of the Forbes Technology Council and being part of the Stanford Business School initiative to tackle global problems.

Babu says he is still a student and knows that not all the projects he embarks on will be game changers. He says he can claim a 100% success rate and no rejections in only one thing: when he proposed to the love of his life. “I told her I would be poor for a long time, but she agreed, and we got married in 1999,” he says with a hearty laugh.

That actually bodes well for Trivandrum because his love for his hometown is as genuine as any. So maybe that San Francisco flight is not a daydream after all.

TN conclave shows the way for Kerala officials

Umagine, the mega IT summit organised by the Tamil Nadu government, attracted over 12,000 attendees, and Chief Minister MK Stalin announced during the event that he plans to make the state a trillion-dollar economy by 2030. More than the official declarations, what attracted our attention was the impression that the TN officials made on the delegates. Some Kerala startup founders who attended the event tell us that the officials went out of their way to accommodate them, and IT Minister Mano Thangaraj, who was apparently present at the venue almost throughout, made himself accessible to the attendees. In contrast, the Huddle held at Kovalam last December ended with no minister, MLA, or MP attending the concluding session.         

The TN government had also roped in Kerala startup PreMagic as an official partner and used their AI-based photo management system during the event. This provided the startup with a platform to showcase their product, which seems to have impressed quite a few delegates. Apparently, Thangaraj had met the PreMagic guys at the closing event of the Huddle, and that led to their first government-level assignment. Kerala ministers are second to none when it comes to announcing IT plans and hubs, but what they need to learn from their TN counterparts is how to translate their words into action.

It is getting crowded at the top

Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) rocket successfully placed 36 satellites into orbit, marking another successful commercial operation by the space agency. The satellites will be operational in just a few weeks and will enable London-based OneWeb to offer broadband internet connections for telecom firms around the world. Last Sunday’s launch took the number of OneWeb satellites in space to 618. However, all these new arrivals are making one group jittery: astronomers. They say that light pollution is making their work harder, and an editorial in Nature argues that even a ban on more such satellites should be considered. “If matters continue, dozens, hundreds, thousands of satellites will be seen crossing the skies at any given moment, and no human being will be able to admire the night sky as it was always possible to do,” it warns.

A case of too little, too late to stop the AI race

Ever since ChatGPT was unveiled late last year, it has been a race between tech giants to unveil their model of large language models (LLMs) and AI-powered programs. Google, Microsoft, Chinese tech firms like Baidu and Alibaba are among those vying for a place at the table. Now an open letter signed by some of the best minds in the cyber world wants this race to stop. They say the developers are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control”. But as Google’s Sundar Pichai told NYT’s Hard Fork podcast, a self regulatory plan is difficult to achieve now and unless government steps in, the race will continue. With India, South Korea and some other countries also looking to develop their own versions, wonder which government can shape a consensus on this now.

Three cheers to this German beer maker

If you have friends like ours, you may have already seen or heard about this news. Apparently, a Munich brewery that was established by a monastery 400 years ago has developed powdered beer. Just add some cold water and chill, they say. But before you start high-fiving, here's the catch: the powder they developed is for non-alcoholic beer, though Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle says it can easily be turned into more potent stuff. If this innovation goes mainstream, it will disrupt the entire beer industry as 90 percent of beer is water. So take that out, and you're going to see a revolution in beer transport.  Honestly, we have to give it up to these German innovators. They're thinking outside the bottle, so to speak.