HYDERABAD: Afirst generation entrepreneur from the city, Sridhar Gadhi had limited financial and experiential means to actualise his strong entrepreneurial dreams when he started his venture Paradigm Info Tech in 1998. From the point of no resources, to building a 3,500 people strong group, with over $100 million in revenues, it has been a roller coaster for this hard-nosed entrepreneur.
Talking about his entrepreneurial journey, he gets nostalgic, “I was always an entrepreneur at heart. It goes way back when I was in high school, I moved from being an average student to topper from the time the teacher announced a fee waiver for the student topping the math class. My first enterprise was running a tuition centre for students, who are only two years junior to me and I took up employment and moved to US, but the urge to be an entrepreneur was so strong that I actually my quit job with firm belief that Y2K is time to make a killing.”
Sridhar, like many of his contemporaries in the late 1990s was working in IBM when he dared to dream bigger and with just a shoestring budget of $25,000, he quit his job at IBM, to start his own venture, Paradigm InfoTech in the United States. “My company started out as any other service provider during the Y2K boom, but what was clear to me from day one was that this would not be a long term sustainable model and had quickly built a practice around Peoplesoft even before the boom ended and had business continuity irrespective of Y2K. This thought has remained with me ever since that in order to be relevant we need to be constantly innovating and reaching out to newer ideas. In 2010, I moved back to India and the mobile era was coming into being we were one of the earliest mobility company out of Hyderabad focused not only on services but platforms and we made investments into frameworks that became a future course of business for us. From mobility to complete digital and IT was a natural extension path for us and today our businesses comprises of digital, IoT , smart cities practice and our managed services piece,” he explains.
Until 5 years ago, Sridhar ran the company almost single handedly. But he felt that something was amiss. “Second generation entrepreneurs have many things worked out for them already. But for first generation entrepreneurs like me, it is a continuous process of evolving. I have roped in a few senior level executives who were passionate about their work and extremely knowledgeable in their areas of work. I have also built an excellent incubation environment for fresh ideas to evolve and transform into reality with products like MyChoice , SmacX and CDP all emerging from this innovation culture he has built within the organisation.,” he beams.
Sridhar’s span of control extends to cold roll forming, hospitality, warehousing and other real estate investments. Each of these ventures being managed by a professional operating team with stake in profitability. Sridhar’s philosophy has been to make more entrepreneurs and partners do better work than employees.
He had witnessed the worst downfall in market when recession affected the Nasdaq and other markets in America. Questioning on how he had cruised through those days? He says, “Those were the testing times. I had my entire net worth which I worked hard for four years wiped out in one month. The lesson I had learnt from that period serves me even today. I had learnt to separate business wealth and personal assets and also the need to have physical assets based security which stand by you during difficult times. I also learnt to diversify business with investments into non technology business which have different growth cycles.”