Globals' Geek

In 2000, when he was 14 years old, Suhas Gopinath would pass an internet cafe every day on his way to school. He was then studying in class 9 in the Air Force School in Bangalore. He did not have a computer at home. His friends in school would show off their computers and he would have this desperate urge to use the computer in the internet cafe. 

But the cafe charged Rs 100 for an hour, and Gopinath received just Rs 15 a month as pocket money from his father who was a scientist in the armed forces. 

So he struck a deal with the cafe owner. He said he would run the cafe between 1 pm and 4 pm when the owner closed it to go home for lunch and rest (Gopinath's classes would be over by 12.30 pm). In return, he asked for use of a computer. The cafe owner agreed. 

"That was my first deal and the best deal of my life," says Gopinath. With the computer in the cafe, he developed such expertise in internet technologies that he went on to start a web design company called Globals the same year, and was celebrated as the youngest CEO in the world. In 2007, theEuropean Parliament and International Association for Human Values conferred on him with a 'Young Achiever Award'. In 2008, he was invited to represent the World Bank's ICT (information and communication technology) Leadership Roundtable to foster ICT skills in students in Africa, and as part of that, he has worked on IT solutions in countries like Uganda and Nigeria. 


Over the past few years, he has developed an ERP (enterprise resource planning) product for educational institutions that is currently being used by 150 schools in India and overseas. Gopinath declines to talk about his revenues, but the company last week received venture funding from Encore Operating Partners, Mauritius, and Commonwealth Education Trust, UK. 

Ask him about the challenges he's faced, and he tells you that his age has always been his biggest challenge. 

His early initiatives, such as the deal with the internet cafe owner and the web design work, had to be done on the sly, without his parents' knowledge. On August 1, 2000, when he started his company, his parents were far from thrilled. 

"In March that year, I had flunked my Math internal test, and my mother was shocked. I told her even Bill Gates had not completed his education. My mother was not convinced. I was from a non-business south Indian community, and education was the first priority. You became an entrepreneur as a last resort, only because you had not got the education required." He joined an engineering course but dropped out in the 5th semester because his company work led to an attendance shortage. His parents were upset, said he wouldn't be able to get married if he didn't have a degree. 

His age did not allow him to start his company in India (you need to be 18 for that). So he registered it in the US with the help of a friend there. An American company declined to work with him saying they felt insecure working with someone who "may not even have a moustache". His age did not allow him to sign certain agreements. His age put off people who he wanted to recruit, many of who were twice his age. "Even ministers and bureaucrats are reluctant to deal with someone who is no more than their son's age," says Gopinath, who is 25 now and still carries his boyish looks. 

But help first came from the internet cafe owner, who introduced Gopinath to his NRI friends in the US. "It was the dotcom boom days and many of these Indians had gone there to build websites, and they would outsource some of the work to me." 

In 2006, when he was 20, he registered a company in India. By then he had realized that the opportunity in web designing was limited as these were becoming automated. So he turned to education ERP that could help school administrators and teachers manage everything from admissions to class schedules. "I found that those like SAP and Oracle did not have something for the education sector." 

His pilot project was in his own Air Force school. More recently, he has transformed the product into what is known as software-as-a-service. Schools can pay for the software on a monthly basis, depending on usage, which makes it enormously more attractive than buying a software license for several lakhs of rupees. "With this we can potentially have many more schools adopting the software," says Gopinath.