Life Desk :
Many young married couples are starting ventures together. And though they have their disagreements, though they often take their work home, and their home to work, Shalina Pillai, Anand J & Aparna D find that most have discovered ways to handle such challenges, especially by clearly defining their roles.
They married after four years of an intercontinental romance. So Sunil Vallath and Parvathy S are now very happy being together all the time, doing their venture Exploride that’s developing a transparent screen for car dashboards that displays a variety of information without obstructing the driver’s view. It’s about a year since they got married. Parvathy is a US citizen who grew up in Baltimore.And while Parvathy was completing her management degree in the US, Sunil was working in IT companies in India and the Middle East, which kept them separate for four years. The idea for their venture came when they were speaking over phone and Parvathy, who was driving, met with an accident.
“We never get a feeling of working and it is mostly fun, though there is the occasional stress too,” says Sunil. Whenever the couple has professional differences, they leave the decision to the board of directors. “At the end of the day, we know it is business,” says Parvathy. She notes that Sunil frequently expresses radical ideas. “In fact, the harder thing for me is to adjust to India,” she adds. Since she moved to India, she’s been struggling with allergies.
The couple is in Bengaluru now, scouting for talent and office space after struggling to find people to work for their venture in Kochi. They have raised more than $500,000 in pre-orders for their incar device.
Chaitanya Chitta and Lakshmi Dasaka of Hyderabad met through a common friend and got married in 2008. They worked together at KPMG, New York, for some time, and then decided to return home.Both were passionate about doing a venture of their own and founded DropKaffe, together with friend Rakshit Kejriwal, in 2013.
Chaitanya says 80% of their conversations at home revolve around work. They have found a way to handle their personal lives by taking turns to do household chores like buying groceries and managing family matters. “We do it in a way that we come out stronger,” he says, though he admits he is still rebuked by Lakshmi for not taking enough time out for their three-year-old son, Samarth.
They have also found a new way of mixing business with pleasure by taking business trips together to different places.Chaitanya points out that since he is the CEO and Lakshmi the COO, many believe they work as one unit. “But she is an entity of her own. May be some day I would want to work for a startup where she is the CEO,” he says.
Their relationship started as a college romance, in Anna University, Chennai. “Within a year of dating, we knew we complemented each other and could make a partnership for life,” says Vasupal. They got married in 2005 when they were 23.
Both were passionate about travel and both were keen on doing a venture of their own.That was the origin of Stayzilla, in 2009. Now, their work relationship extends to the home, so much so that even their two children, aged 5 and 6, discuss work with them. However, both try not to overdo it. “We have a 60% working and a 40% personal relationship. We end up communicating with each other through WhatsApp or email if it’s about work, even if we are sitting just three feet away from each other in the same room!” Vasupal says.
They knew they had to have different roles.While Rupal handles customer experience, Vasupal heads sales. But they still have their share of fights. Both fought long over Stayzilla’s ‘concierge’ feature. Vasupal was dead against it, but he says Rupal was smart enough to push the envelope little by little till he agreed. “By the end of 2013, we realized most of our customers were coming back only because of it.”
A banker once got upset when someone told him that the founders of Mobikwik, Upasana Taku and Bipin Preet Singh, were married. They had visited him several times but never disclosed that status. Bipin had to explain to the banker that their professional and private lives were different and they had come to meet him in their professional capacities. The banker hasn’t been the only one ignorant of this open secret. Many in the 240-people company remained unaware of their relationship even after they had a baby two months ago.
“It is inevitable that when key people in the company are married to each other, they will end up encroaching on personal space, which is not the ideal thing,” Bipin says. He says it took some training and discipline to not keep discussing the company they founded together in 2010. The two got married the year after they founded Mobikwik. They initially worked from home, and later took an office. “Taking an office helped to keep things in control,” Bipin says.
Bipin feels that if the founders are not different individuals, investors wouldn’t see value in their roles as top management. He says he and Upasana are very different.Upasana takes care of marketing and Bipin the technical side. Upasana is now on maternity leave and is at her parents’ house. “Running a startup can be stressful at times and I don’t want to transfer any stress to her and the baby.”
They play distinct roles Anand Chandrasekaran and Ashwini Asokan play very distinct roles in their venture Mad Street Den. And it really helps. While neuroscientistturned-neuromorphic engineer Anand gets into the physics and biology of the products they build, Ashwini, a designer, explores the potential markets for their products. And when one needs to be home, that isn’t a problem at all.” Anand was a stay-at-home dad taking care of the kid, when I was working hard. I think the mutual adjustment went a long way to help us succeed as an entrepreneur couple,” Ashwini says.
Ashwini says she could not have started Mad Street Den with anyone other than Anand. “We’ve known each other for close to 1617 years now, and in the early years of our career in the US, when I was working in Intel, we used to discuss applications of artificial intelligence for hours,” she says. Once back in India, with their two children, aged one and five, the couple developed a visual search solution for online portals. They have attracted Rs 9 crore from VCs and have over 50 customers worldwide.
Being a couple makes it easier to take decisions and in turn yields better results, says Ashwini. “Even when we decide to leave the kids at home with their grandparents and go out, we discuss work. I guess that’s how involved one needs to be as entrepreneurs,” she says.Sometimes, discussions become arguments, but they end up resolved.
Shubhra Chadda and Vivek Prabhakar were friends for six years before they started dating. “He was an extrovert and an easy guy to be with,” says Shubhra. After their marriage in 2004, they used to take overseas trips together. “I started collecting fridge magnets from the places I visited and I realized there wasn’t a single magnet from India. That was the origin of our idea for Chumbak.”
Vivek quit his job from Sun Microsystems and joined Shubhra in 2011. From a spouse to a colleague, Shubhra says their dynamics totally changed. “For the first four months, we fought like mad. We didn’t know where to draw the line between personal and professional,” she says. However, after recognizing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, they have over time come to draw a line and consider themselves lucky to have each other by their side. He is the CEO while she heads the product and design.
“Sometimes we enter the office together, but rarely get a chance to even talk,” she says. When at home, they have taken a conscious decision to not talk much about work. “There is 100% trust between us. So it’s not about me vs you.”
However, there is also a downside to working with someone you are close to. “Sometimes when you try to be smart, it can actually backfire since they know you so well,” says Shubhra, with a laugh.
On the day that TOI spoke to the founders of Clovia, Neha Kant was supervising a lingerie photoshoot with live models, while husband Pankaj Vermani was baby-sitting at home. “Yes, after 15 years, there is still some trust deficit,” Pankaj jokes. The two met very young, when Neha was an 18-year-old studying at Miranda House in Delhi University, and he a third-year student at IIT Delhi.They married in 2005.
Clovia was Neha’s idea, and she incorporated it in 2012.Pankaj joined the company later. He says a couple running a company together has great advantages as both know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. “We thought it would be complicated but it isn’t, not all that much. We don’t talk business before 9 am and after 9 pm,” Neha says.
Pankaj says in his previous stints, he worked with interesting partners, but he says Neha has been the coolest of them all. Now the father of a two-year old, he finds himself working more than Neha. “Whenever it is just the two of us in an office room, we end up talking about our child,” he says.
-TNN
Many young married couples are starting ventures together. And though they have their disagreements, though they often take their work home, and their home to work, Shalina Pillai, Anand J & Aparna D find that most have discovered ways to handle such challenges, especially by clearly defining their roles.
They married after four years of an intercontinental romance. So Sunil Vallath and Parvathy S are now very happy being together all the time, doing their venture Exploride that’s developing a transparent screen for car dashboards that displays a variety of information without obstructing the driver’s view. It’s about a year since they got married. Parvathy is a US citizen who grew up in Baltimore.And while Parvathy was completing her management degree in the US, Sunil was working in IT companies in India and the Middle East, which kept them separate for four years. The idea for their venture came when they were speaking over phone and Parvathy, who was driving, met with an accident.
“We never get a feeling of working and it is mostly fun, though there is the occasional stress too,” says Sunil. Whenever the couple has professional differences, they leave the decision to the board of directors. “At the end of the day, we know it is business,” says Parvathy. She notes that Sunil frequently expresses radical ideas. “In fact, the harder thing for me is to adjust to India,” she adds. Since she moved to India, she’s been struggling with allergies.
The couple is in Bengaluru now, scouting for talent and office space after struggling to find people to work for their venture in Kochi. They have raised more than $500,000 in pre-orders for their incar device.
Chaitanya Chitta and Lakshmi Dasaka of Hyderabad met through a common friend and got married in 2008. They worked together at KPMG, New York, for some time, and then decided to return home.Both were passionate about doing a venture of their own and founded DropKaffe, together with friend Rakshit Kejriwal, in 2013.
Chaitanya says 80% of their conversations at home revolve around work. They have found a way to handle their personal lives by taking turns to do household chores like buying groceries and managing family matters. “We do it in a way that we come out stronger,” he says, though he admits he is still rebuked by Lakshmi for not taking enough time out for their three-year-old son, Samarth.
They have also found a new way of mixing business with pleasure by taking business trips together to different places.Chaitanya points out that since he is the CEO and Lakshmi the COO, many believe they work as one unit. “But she is an entity of her own. May be some day I would want to work for a startup where she is the CEO,” he says.
Their relationship started as a college romance, in Anna University, Chennai. “Within a year of dating, we knew we complemented each other and could make a partnership for life,” says Vasupal. They got married in 2005 when they were 23.
Both were passionate about travel and both were keen on doing a venture of their own.That was the origin of Stayzilla, in 2009. Now, their work relationship extends to the home, so much so that even their two children, aged 5 and 6, discuss work with them. However, both try not to overdo it. “We have a 60% working and a 40% personal relationship. We end up communicating with each other through WhatsApp or email if it’s about work, even if we are sitting just three feet away from each other in the same room!” Vasupal says.
They knew they had to have different roles.While Rupal handles customer experience, Vasupal heads sales. But they still have their share of fights. Both fought long over Stayzilla’s ‘concierge’ feature. Vasupal was dead against it, but he says Rupal was smart enough to push the envelope little by little till he agreed. “By the end of 2013, we realized most of our customers were coming back only because of it.”
A banker once got upset when someone told him that the founders of Mobikwik, Upasana Taku and Bipin Preet Singh, were married. They had visited him several times but never disclosed that status. Bipin had to explain to the banker that their professional and private lives were different and they had come to meet him in their professional capacities. The banker hasn’t been the only one ignorant of this open secret. Many in the 240-people company remained unaware of their relationship even after they had a baby two months ago.
“It is inevitable that when key people in the company are married to each other, they will end up encroaching on personal space, which is not the ideal thing,” Bipin says. He says it took some training and discipline to not keep discussing the company they founded together in 2010. The two got married the year after they founded Mobikwik. They initially worked from home, and later took an office. “Taking an office helped to keep things in control,” Bipin says.
Bipin feels that if the founders are not different individuals, investors wouldn’t see value in their roles as top management. He says he and Upasana are very different.Upasana takes care of marketing and Bipin the technical side. Upasana is now on maternity leave and is at her parents’ house. “Running a startup can be stressful at times and I don’t want to transfer any stress to her and the baby.”
They play distinct roles Anand Chandrasekaran and Ashwini Asokan play very distinct roles in their venture Mad Street Den. And it really helps. While neuroscientistturned-neuromorphic engineer Anand gets into the physics and biology of the products they build, Ashwini, a designer, explores the potential markets for their products. And when one needs to be home, that isn’t a problem at all.” Anand was a stay-at-home dad taking care of the kid, when I was working hard. I think the mutual adjustment went a long way to help us succeed as an entrepreneur couple,” Ashwini says.
Ashwini says she could not have started Mad Street Den with anyone other than Anand. “We’ve known each other for close to 1617 years now, and in the early years of our career in the US, when I was working in Intel, we used to discuss applications of artificial intelligence for hours,” she says. Once back in India, with their two children, aged one and five, the couple developed a visual search solution for online portals. They have attracted Rs 9 crore from VCs and have over 50 customers worldwide.
Being a couple makes it easier to take decisions and in turn yields better results, says Ashwini. “Even when we decide to leave the kids at home with their grandparents and go out, we discuss work. I guess that’s how involved one needs to be as entrepreneurs,” she says.Sometimes, discussions become arguments, but they end up resolved.
Shubhra Chadda and Vivek Prabhakar were friends for six years before they started dating. “He was an extrovert and an easy guy to be with,” says Shubhra. After their marriage in 2004, they used to take overseas trips together. “I started collecting fridge magnets from the places I visited and I realized there wasn’t a single magnet from India. That was the origin of our idea for Chumbak.”
Vivek quit his job from Sun Microsystems and joined Shubhra in 2011. From a spouse to a colleague, Shubhra says their dynamics totally changed. “For the first four months, we fought like mad. We didn’t know where to draw the line between personal and professional,” she says. However, after recognizing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, they have over time come to draw a line and consider themselves lucky to have each other by their side. He is the CEO while she heads the product and design.
“Sometimes we enter the office together, but rarely get a chance to even talk,” she says. When at home, they have taken a conscious decision to not talk much about work. “There is 100% trust between us. So it’s not about me vs you.”
However, there is also a downside to working with someone you are close to. “Sometimes when you try to be smart, it can actually backfire since they know you so well,” says Shubhra, with a laugh.
On the day that TOI spoke to the founders of Clovia, Neha Kant was supervising a lingerie photoshoot with live models, while husband Pankaj Vermani was baby-sitting at home. “Yes, after 15 years, there is still some trust deficit,” Pankaj jokes. The two met very young, when Neha was an 18-year-old studying at Miranda House in Delhi University, and he a third-year student at IIT Delhi.They married in 2005.
Clovia was Neha’s idea, and she incorporated it in 2012.Pankaj joined the company later. He says a couple running a company together has great advantages as both know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. “We thought it would be complicated but it isn’t, not all that much. We don’t talk business before 9 am and after 9 pm,” Neha says.
Pankaj says in his previous stints, he worked with interesting partners, but he says Neha has been the coolest of them all. Now the father of a two-year old, he finds himself working more than Neha. “Whenever it is just the two of us in an office room, we end up talking about our child,” he says.
-TNN
