From College Dropout to going viral - Introducing Deepak Ravindran

I dropped out from College to pursue a less-common career path on the Internet and I will be discussing how learning, passion, discipline, and failure have related to my own experiences.

Imagine if you can get all the information that you're looking at all through just sending an SMS. Well, that's exactly what we started doing in 2008.I was 19 and I'm on sitting on the last corner

These are my friends, my co-founders with whom I co-founded on this day SMSgyan. So Gyan means knowledge in Hindi. In college, we used to have a lot of fun time like you know. We used to sit at the College gate and watching like the chicks coming on; not only me all those guys all my friends sitting there has one thing in all mind how to impress her, I just asked one of my friend they're like you know - how can I impress her

They say it like I don't know; you can like try on the Internet and at first, go to Google and search it.

So I said like I don't have any Google right now so how can I do that. That's the Eureka moment like you know we all have mobile phones and we don't have that access to get that information so that's why we thought like why not we implement something by which we can get all the information that you're looking at just by sending an SMS.

Next day we started doing that right from the college. We took a small space in the college computer library and we started designing it. Once my CTO sitting there with the VC, he implemented that I asked SMSgyan one question like you know how can I sell this stuff and make money, as Imus gone, told me that you know, you can go to Gurgaon which is actually the telecom valley in India and you can sell to the clients like telecom operators and you can make money.

I dropped out of college went to Delhi and met every telecom operator, I was really frustrated in the fact that you know people are looking at me and saying like you know you can't work with you cuz we were very small not just you and but the company also.

So I was really first frustrated and I went to a coffee shop, I was sitting there having a coffee and luck for me is that there was a guy who came to the coffee shop and he had was carrying a Bharti Airtel tag with him he's just sat in front of me so I just thought of like why not I talked to him and I said like you know I have this idea God and I want to launch in India

So he said like you know why not you meet me in the office tomorrow and then I realized the next day that he is the head of our theater for the new products and then we launched the product.

After three years we are delivered more than 250 million queries that people asked.
We had delivered more than 50 gigabytes of information to the people who don't even know how to use the Internet that's by which we empowered more than 10 million users in India. It's like a channel you give Internet to non non-internettomers, it's like you know less than 100 million Internet users and like you know in this country who have billion people and on the other hand you got around 700 million mobile phones so it's like I had given one tenth of Internet connectivity in India through ASEAN platform in less than three years so that's the power that I have and so far people are saying like this would probably be the largest offline search on mobile in the days to come lot of use cases very interesting things are like you know students in small cities and you know rural areas especially woman are using it as a tool to learn about sex education like because you got mobile as a private companion you can ask anything you are not afraid to ask some of the funny queries that we answered or like you know one one guy in college us like why is an angry bird angry and you know what it's because the pics tall they are eggs that's what Gant reply I was happy like lot of questions like you know some other questions like you know why is an Apple logo half-bitten some of the questions like why is it called hot dog when it's not made of dog these are the questions these are the questions that people were afraid to ask or because of because they were shy but now they got and they got an on their pocket so they are they're free to ask thousands of where millions of people are using SMS and today so there is a small story but I like it I like it the fact that you know we started young also and that's it

Thanks so much you.