BANGALORE: Vibhore Goyal started CoCubes.com in 2007 with Harpreet, his roommate from IIT-Bombay. CoCubes comes from Connecting Colleges and Companies, or (Co)3,and is one of India’s largest assessment and campus hiring platforms, having worked with over 450 companies, 2,600 colleges, and more than one million students across 250 cities. Their vision is to ensure that everyone in the country gets an equal opportunity to build a career. Being from IIT-Bombay, they never thought of employability as a problem in the country, till a meeting with Harpreet’s uncle made them look at this space seriously. Within six months, both of them decided to quit their jobs, excited at the possibility of making a difference to college students.
Growing up in Jaipur, Goyal struggled with all the subjects, except Maths. From Class VII, the teachers at the new school pushed him hard and he came third in Class VII. Having tasted success, he remained a class topper right up to the CBSE Board exams. He chose Civil Engineering at IIT-Bombay, with a JEE rank of 1955. He spent a lot of time in indoor sports and computer games, and soon started looking deeper at ways to win by finding gateways or loopholes in the code. “This got me interested in coding and develop an eye for detail.”
Goyal joined Microsoft Research (MSR) after IIT, where he worked on projects involving mobile, SMS communication and emerging technologies. He tried to understand the problems of the middle and lower-middle class, how government policies affect these segments and how IT can play a role there. In 18 months at MSR, Goyal filed six patents, before realising that is was time to do something that can have a direct impact on the society. He started Babajob.com with Sean, his manager at MSR, which was a highly popular web 2.0 based platform that helps low-skilled people find jobs. With a desire to work in New Delhi with a friend, he started CoCubes. In the last seven years, CoCubes has won awards like the Deloitte Technology Fast50 India and Top 10 Emerging Companies by NASSCOM. They have been featured as ‘Entrepreneurs under 30’ in Business Outlook and a case study has been written on CoCubes by Harvard Business Publishing.
He says, “There can be no compromise on quality. Just doing a task for the sake of doing it would render itself moot. Understanding the product and associated deliverables is an art. You have to believe you are the artist who can create it with perfection.”
— rohit@learnbizsimulations.com