Ruchit Garg, Founder CEO at 9Slides (USA/India)

As a first generation immigrant entrepreneur who left a well-paying job at Microsoft to start his own company, Ruchit’s hands-on experience in entrepreneurship is very valuable from how to take a business idea from imagination to a real company, ways to bootstrap a tech startup, raising funds, building your first products, and even marketing and selling as a one man army (online and offline).

After about 12 years of building products at companies like Microsoft, today Ruchit is growing his next company which is already getting great customer traction across the globe. As Founder & CEO of 9Slides.com, Ruchit’s company specializes in providing communication and online training solutions for companies with mobile workforces.

Key takeaways include:

• Vision, Execution and Passion are three main things separating success from failure.
• America is no doubt best place to start and thrive… in Asian countries failure is a stigma in India that leads to folks not trying out enough, where as in America failures are welcomed.
• Word of mouth is still a wonderful way to grow a customer base.

You can visit his company at 9Slides.com.

What was it like leaving the perceived security that Microsoft was offering you to start your own business? It must have been quite a shock to go from working for one of the world’s largest companies to a small business. What made you want to leave?

Its tough to leave company like Microsoft where I have worked on some of the most successful products like XBOX live, and security of job, salary and benefit. But itch to start of my own again was too strong and I decided to leave mothership.

For the past few years, “bootstrapping” has been probably the second most used key phrase after “think outside the box”. What does bootstrapping mean to you and what are the benefits of starting and running an operation like this?

You are right, bootstrapping is over used word and means different things to different people. Bootstrapping for me was conviction to leave big company without any backup or any firm investment commitment from anyone. It took me good few months before I could convince investors to invest in the dream project, and those days were very very difficult for me, my family with kids. Survival was on question. Its good idea to burn money slow to understand the product/market fit (call it bootstrap phase), but then one needs to know when to start burning money to grow once there is clear traction.

What are some of the key fundamentals that you’ve seen through the years that separate incredible business success with mediocre ones getting just average returns? How do you prevent YOUR business from just becoming a job that you own?

Vision, Execution and Passion are three main things. I have been folks with some incredible ideas not pursuing it because of lack of passion. Then there are lot of startup who continue to chase their vision without executing it properly and changing gears as market changes. I have also seen startups who do not have big visions. They just want to sell out for few millions dollars to start with. When you dream small, you land something smaller, so if you dream very very big and passionately follow it, and execute it properly, you can bring in some really big changes around. So much so that you would be amazed what you have accomplished looking back.

Raising funds, especially from Angels and VCs generally comes down to one question. How much equity do you give-up in return for financial backing? How do you go about negotiating the absolute best deal you can when you REALLY need the money? Should you be willing to walk away and close the company if you can’t get what you want?

There is no right or wrong answer here. Its like a typical buyer-seller equation. If there are lot of buyers (investors in this case) chasing limited number of deals (startups) its likely seller (founder) can negotiate a good deal. I would rather have 30% ownership of a company have likely chance of being successful after raising money rather than owning 100% of a company which would die because of no funding.

What are some of the most successful ways you’ve found to promote a company online? Is SEO/SEM really a dying art or has it just gotten such a bad wrap and become so difficult that people just jump before seeing the positive results?

SEO is getting increasingly difficult. Google have started to hide information about source of traffic and there are no good ways for us separate traffic from organic from inorganic searches. Whereas we are seeing some good results in doing content marketing. Help potential customers with thought leadership content in the form of blog, info-graphics, guides and eventually if you are doing good job with your product and messaging, customers would line up.

I’ve never been to India but seen many documentaries about this beautiful country. What are some of the differences towards business that you notice between running operations there vs North America?

Its different. I have not travelled to many portion of North America myself, but business wise America is no doubt best place to start and thrive. There is lot more support system, ecosystem for entrepreneurs already available. Also like other Asian countries failure is a stigma in India that leads to folks not trying out enough, where as in America failures are welcomed, fueling lot more startups and strengthening ecosystem overall.

You began 9slides.com after leaving Microsoft… can you explain to me in non-technical terms what problem it solves and why a company would need 9slides.com vs current methods of communications such as powerpoint hooked-up to screensharing or webinar type interfaces?

We share documents like powerpoint all the time on internet and/or within corporate intranet. But we do not realize that there is lot of story behind text and images on the document we have, which never get communicated. It makes communication very in-effective. At 9slides, we let yours add audio-video narrative from their mobile devices like iPad. Once shared, their audience can view rich audio-video enabled slides on almost any device without installing any software. Very powerful. We also let you track who is watching content, how long they are watching and even help you ask questions to audience to measure comprehension of your audience.

You have over 15 000 customers so far for 9slides.com, how did you go about acquiring so many customers and what are some of the best way you see for getting the word out on your business and its products?

Mostly word of mouth. Good thing about our product is when someone uses 9slides they share it with someone else. That’s a great way to get known. We are also focusing in educating our potential customers using our blog www.9slides.com/blog on latest trends & technology about online training.

Anything else you’d like to add Ruchit?

Follow the passion, everything you need will follow you.