Vijay Shekhar Sharma was something of a child prodigy because he finished school when he was just 14, was the youngest engineer to graduate from the Delhi College of Engineering, and he set up his business at 19.
This 28 year-old comes form a family of educators from Bihar but didn't want to do the same thing. His dream was bigger and he wanted to get there in a hurry. He wanted to own a billion dollar company by the time he was 30 years old, so he decided to get started early and that's how he began an internet services firm in college. The initial startup was sold to a New Jersey-based telecom software company.
Then came One97 Communications. So, just what is One97 Communications all about? It's about what makes India abuzz these days - SMSs, funky ringtones and it's something that Sharma's company caught on to pretty fast. But the real break came to him with www.india-todayonline.com.
The founder and managing director of One97 Communications told CNBC-TV18, "India-Today online happened to me at a time, when I was still in college and we were trying to build an Internet company. We met Arun Katiyal there and he was helpful in teaching us about the real world. We worked with him to make an instant messenger application. I always believe in one thing - why should you be in a bunch of horses, when you can own those horses."
He believes in learning from everyone and his inspiration has been Sunil Bharti Mittal, who later came to him with a contract. And as expected, Vijay was over the moon to be approached by his idol to do business. He says, working with Bhari has been a learning experience and he feels there is an emotional connection between them.
This firm has been approached by venture capitalists but he sees long term opportunities and Vijay says he makes a lot more money than people can offer them today! He explains, "There are not enough players and this is a very hot space. We are stretching our resources and it's a wonderful time to be in this business."
His company has been approximately valued at $50 million and he's looking forward to an exciting time. His future could be moving towards video and as he puts it, "We've been actively working with video. We'll soon launch video SMSs, video portals, videogames and everything that will bring video on to your phone. You would see video ringbacks, video portals and you could have flicker-free video on-demand on your phone."
"Secondly, there will be more network-based value added services - this could be something called spam-call block. Right now, we are testing a beta version of the spam-call block. For instance, when you go abroad and you might not want to take all the calls - then you will be able to set a profile - and you can opt for only select calls to come in and the rest can go to voice mail or any other system."
The next generation applications that Vijay is looking at is fax applications, USSD (unstructured supplementary services data) applications and he plans to deploy his operations between national and global operators. Though he believes the volumes, profits and the learning opportunities will be more in the domestic market.
He also has plans to list in the future but before that, he wants to be worth it. So, he's partnering with a lot of retail firms like Pantaloon, Barista so that he's available to his customers first.
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