Arun Pai

Countdown: 5 days !! Butterflies in the stomach, mainly because of all the undone work at the current job. I will end up leaving feeling guilty about not winding up seamlessly. Priya is off tomorrow to Chennai, her school year is over.

We had a 4 day weekend here and I had lots of interesting conversations and meetings. Its going to take a while to blog it all. Here's the first.

I talked to Arun Pai who is the founder of Bangalorewalks.com. I've been on several of the walks, and have talked with him a little and felt it would be useful to keep in touch. Arun is actually 1 year senior to me at IIT Madras (I didn't know that until recently), he is '91 Mech Godav, football team captain (also sports sec ?). He went to IIM after that, worked for Anderson, worked with a chap called Mahesh Murthy at a Indian VC firm called Passionfund and did various cool things. Mahesh Murthy is quite well-known, he does a column in an Indian business magazine. Currently he does a very interesting company called Pinstorm that is into helping advertisers to get the best bang for their online advertising buck. The size of the online advertising market is quite large (~ a few billion dollars) but making intelligent decisions about online ad purchase is still a young science and these folks are the pioneers.
Arun himself was fairly instrumental in pioneering the field of outsourced online tutoring. Here, a guy or gal in India will be on VoiP with a kid in the US along with a computer whiteboard and do the tutoring. Its quite a big business now apparently. We also talked about CareerLauncher which Arun was associated with for some time. It was started by his wingmates from IIM. They are a corporate, professional, nationwide version of your neighbourhood coaching center.
Other stuff we talked about: business ideas in India. There are two interesting ones 70mm.com is India's version of Netflix. And Easylib.com is a neat one: an online book lending library.
Arun also pointed me to a nearby open house that was held this week for household composting products. More (much more!) on that later, as I got very enthusiastic about it. In connection with that I also heard about Shristi , a design school in Bangalore.
Arun spent about 5 months before starting Bangalorewalks, just exploring various interesting business ideas that came to him. One that he followed up seriously before giving it up was children's book publishing in India. He felt strongly that there were no good books with Indian context and background for children and so wanted to go into that. After checking it out, he finally backed out as he felt the business model that it needed was not what he wanted to do.
We finally talked about the usefulness of doing an MBA (he went to IIM immediately after doing his B.Tech.). He felt that it *was* useful in a couple of ways (don't remember what they were ;-) ).
Arun hosts his website on nettygritty. They are very cheap he says (as low as 2000/- a year for a low end package), and based out of Bangalore. BTW, despoki.net has expired (and the people at Yahoo! didn't inform me ! What's wrong with them!!). I am considering switching my loyalty to Nettygritty.
We talked a little bit about nonprofits. His wife was associated with Akshara and Pratham. Another high profile local group is Janaagraha

That's it from Arun Pai, an all round good guy.