Meet The Master Of Swing
From the highs of triumph to the haunting lows of near-bankruptcy, Ashish Tandon has lived every entrepreneur’s nightmare and turned it into his greatest strength. What kept him going wasn’t luck or timing but an unyielding belief in himself. Meet the ‘Master of Swing’ who epitomises a quiet, stubborn conviction that no fall is final, and no failure fatal.
The sun was merciless that morning. The field was crowded. Around a thousand young boys, all in white, were chasing one big dream of making it to the Under-15 cricket team of Baroda, Gujarat. Cricket bats glinted in the light, red leather balls skid gently across the dew-kissed ground, and the air smelled of sweat, dust, and hope. At the far end of the pitch stood Ashish Tandon, 12, skinny but fierce, tightening the laces on his shoes. The words of his doting father echoed in his head: “Fast bowlers don’t need luck. They need fire.” Ashish took a deep breath. His raw pace found a matching partner in his unflinching determination.
The young boy, though, needed a slice of luck. The selectors barely looked up as names were called. One boy after another bowled. Some were dismissed in seconds, some fleetingly caught the attention, and some looked promising. But none was outstanding.
Ashish waited. His heart pounded, and legs and arms were desperate to display their power. Eventually, his turn came. He was the last one to be called. He ran in hard. The ball sliced the air, kissed the turf, and slammed into the stump with a sharp crack. He was quick. The boys thought it was a fluke. Ashish was asked to bowl again. Nothing changed. He dislodged the stumps. He did it again for the third time. And the fourth time. Same result: the stump jumped. The head coach finally spotted a raw diamond. There was talent. There was promise. And there was hope.
Two decades later, the hope that carried the electrical engineer this far collapsed in silence. It was a few months ahead of the onset of the pandemic in 2020. The serial entrepreneur was all set to ink a sellout deal with a large American company. It had taken him months to stitch the plan. Just two days before signing the agreement, he received a phone call. The deal slipped through his fingers. Blame it on circumstances, he could do little. His buyer too was helpless. “Do you understand the feeling of being almost there,” says Ashish, who partnered with Satyam Infoway to start an ISP (internet service provider) business in Baroda in 1999.
WHEN LIFE YORKED HIM!
Over the span of the next twenty years, the bootstrapped founder sold three ventures. Now, in 2020, he was into his fourth venture — Indusface — and had almost pressed the ‘sold’ button, living up to his playbook and craft. The deal hovered on the edge of happening, but never crossed over. “I have lived with this terrible word — almost — and the feeling not once, twice but multiple times,” he recounts, and takes us back to the first lowest moment of his life.
Yes, it was cricket. The first love of his life met with a tragic ending. The young boy played Under 15, Under 19, around a dozen first-class matches in Ranji Trophy — in fact, he bowled his first ball to Sachin Tendulkar — and had good odds of playing for the country. But then the tragedy struck. Hampered by intermittent injuries and stress fractures, Ashish had to end his love affair with cricket. He was heart-broken. “I was devastated when doctors told me that I have to hang up my cricket boots because of recurring injuries,” he recalls. “My life crashed in front of me,” he chokes, as he painfully relives his trauma. Coming from a middle-class family, the Punjabi boy had limited means. His father always encouraged him to live his dream, and the son did his best. “Who plays cricket in rugged canvas shoes and kurta pyjama,” asks Ashish who picked up electrical engineering because the parents of one of his friends wanted him to study ‘powerful.’
‘Electrical’ was indeed powerful, at least in name. But cricket was his life. And now the cruel fate had snubbed his love and life. He was broken but not destroyed.
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What, though, remained intact was his unwavering hope.
THE SWINGING HOPE
Back in 1999, after his college, it was this ‘hope’ that egged him on the path of entrepreneurship. “I could have gone to the US to pursue an MBA,” he tells us, explaining his move to stay back in the country to do something that he had no clue about at all. Not a career in engineering. Not even a change of course in management. “I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t know anything about it. No clue at all. But all I knew is that I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he recalls, sharing a plausible reason for why he selected this path. “This is what Gujarat does to you. It makes entrepreneurs out of nothing,” he smiles.
The beginning, though, had not much to smile about. There was a newspaper advertisement that solicited partners for rolling out internet services in Baroda. Ashish threw his rookie hat in the ring. In a classic ‘David versus Goliath,’ Ashish was pitted against a bunch of big names who had a bright chance of making the cut. But the ‘David’ had something in his arsenal that the ‘Goliaths’ could never ever imagine: a lethal, toe-crushing yorker. The only way Ashish could have bagged the contract was by doing something that nobody could ever think of. He drafted a questionnaire around internet needs and faxed it to almost all businesses and corporates across Baroda.
Next, he waited for their response. Nothing happened on the first day. The second day too went blank. The needle didn’t move in a week. There was radio silence even after two weeks. No response. No acknowledgment. Nothing. The blank picture played on continuously for 20 days. And then over the next few days, the fax machine was overwhelmed. Ashish managed to get responses from over 25,000 potential users, and all confirmed that they would buy internet connection. “Armed with their confirmations, I managed to seal the partnership deal,” he says. Two years later, the entrepreneur sold the flourishing business and moved on to his next innings: a consulting gig.
Flush with money, the bootstrapped entrepreneur weaved an audacious global dream. He partnered with an American vendor to give wings to his cybersecurity plan. Nothing went according to the script. Ashish was saddled with debt, the consulting business dragged on his finances and prospects, and eventually, it had to be shuttered. “We had almost become bankrupt,” he recalls. Now, the choice was between the easy and the tough. It was between picking up a job — and yes, he did have a lucrative CEO role from a large MNC — or starting another business. Ashish, interestingly, found himself in a familiar situation. As a cricketer, he knew bowling on a green top would have a high chance of bagging more wickets. But bowling on a dry and dusty track meant putting in extra yards, making more effort to make the ball reverse swing.
The promising cricketer, interestingly, always loved the hard option. “If it’s easy, anybody can do it,” he says. “And if anybody can do it, then an entrepreneur should stay away from it,” he reckons, adding that he decided to swim against the tide. “My wife (and co-founder) were my biggest pillars of support,” he says. In 2004, he started IndusGuard, one of the first comprehensive application security scanners in India. Eight years later, he sold the bootstrapped company to Trend Micro in 2012. Another venture, another profitable exit, and the serial entrepreneur was on a song. Four years later, he sold his third venture — OpenClove — to MYXCo.
WHY SELL? WHY NOT?
Ask him does it feel to master the playbook of ‘build, scale and sell,’ and the humble entrepreneur uses a cricket analogy to build his case. “If a foot-crushing yorker can get you a certain wicket, then why flirt with the idea of getting the batsmen caught in the slips,” he smiles. Emotions, Ashish underlines, don’t have any place in business decisions. “If somebody is offering me a great price, then I would be more than happy to sell. What’s wrong with it? I am an entrepreneur and I know how to make money,” he says.
So, did he dip into this logic when he ended his bootstrapped sanyaas in 2020? In April that year, Tata Capital Growth Fund II invested $5 million in Indusface. Ashish explains what made him embrace outside capital. First, it’ Tatas. Second, it’s a PE fund, and not a VC. “It’s not that I have anything against VCs, but a bootstrapped entrepreneur’s mindset is more in sync with a PE mindset,” he says. Both are long-term players. Both believe in building sustainable and profitable businesses. And both put a premium to ‘slow and steady’ growth rather than ‘fast and furious’ play.
Ashish, though, interestingly reckons that he has always had investors even during his bootstrapped journey. How? This is how he explains. “My two biggest investors have been my employees, and customers,” he smiles, adding that both stayed invested in the journey and the roller-coaster story.
Okay, but he would have a different and a faster growth trajectory if he had raised VC capital early in his life. Agree? Ashish smiles. “I am happy the way I have run this tight ship,” he reckons. “A lot of people might tag me as a conservative. But it’s okay,” he says, adding that an entrepreneur must make a choice and own the result. “I made a choice and am happy with the price I paid for the choice,” he says. Tags don’t bother him. Call him old-school, risk-averse, or whatever, what gives him happiness is the fact that he has been building profitable ventures. There is nothing evil in venture capital. “It’s all about the choices. Some want rocket fuel, some are happy with the conventional ones,” he adds. “End of the day, if you are doing a business, you must make money,” he says, adding that a radical shift in the language of the VC and startup ecosystem over the last few years is gratifying. “All are asking the right and hard questions around profitability, EBITDA, gross margins and other long-term and sustainable financial metrics,” he says.
Another metric that we wanted to discuss with the seasoned entrepreneur is how does he contrast himself with the new-age founders? Ashish is gushing in his adulation. “The new crop is brilliant,” he says. They have access to tech, information, and capital. They have everything going for them. “They are blessed to be armed with heavy armoury,” he says. But with every blessing, comes a curse. Ashish points out what bothers him about the young and promising founders. “My only concern is that they are short on patience,” he says. The flip side of information overload is that you tend to fall into a trap of ‘I know everything.’ “Do they have the appetite to stomach failure? I don’t know,” he asks.
Though the jury is still out on that front, Ashish prefers to reflect on his gritty journey. Apart from the fuel of passion, the serial entrepreneur has been guided by a priceless ideology: Think of the long-term loss before looking at the short-term gain. “Plucking low-hanging fruit can definitely satiate your hunger pangs but they eventually kill the fire in the belly,” he says.
Well said, Ashish. The man has been playing long innings for over twenty-five years, and running profitable ventures with the same passion he once brought to the pitch. “While the head may guide the business, it’s the heart that truly keeps it alive,” he signs off.
