Vishwak’s 10th Anniversary

Yesterday was a big day for me and for the entire team at Vishwak. We had completed 10 Years in Business as on 1st April 2007. We had a big dinner to celebrate this on 10 May 2007 at Courtyard Marriott, Chennai. We were joined by many of our customers on this happy occasion – including Microsoft India, Hindustan Times, Hutchinson Essar, Bharat Matrimony, ChennaiOnline, K7 Computing, Wipro and others. Mr Jaspreet Bindra (Country Manager India, MSN & Windows Live) was the Chief Guest.

We had many enjoyable programs in the dinner, but the one I treasured most was when we had the 10th Anniversary cake cut by Vishwakians (shown in the photo below) who had been with us for more than 5 years. In this time of great volatility in Indian IT job market – we are lucky to have these dedicated individuals powering “Vishwak” for 5 years+.

Since it was celebration time, few of us spoke and that too briefly.

In my speech, I touched on How did I decide to start Vishwak, what does the name mean and what I enjoy in running Vishwak?.

I am remembering a quote from Bill Clinton where he says if you have more to remember than to dream you are getting old. So, even though I have a kindergarten going boy I don’t want to look too old. Anyways, I want to go into nostalgia for few seconds.

We have completed 10 Years. It has been an exciting journey for me and all others who have been associated with Vishwak. Vishwak was founded in my room in April 1997, we got our first full-time employee in 1999, we got incorporated in 2001, we got our first overseas order in 2003, we opened our 100% subsidiary in the USA in 2005 and now in 2007, we have doubled the USD 1 Million mark.

How did I decide to start Vishwak and what does the name mean?. Probably the second is the most frequently asked question to me. I come from a Business Family running a popular publishing house here called “LIFCO” and we are famous for our dictionaries and sloka books. So starting a business was easy in that sense, I had people around who could guide me on the steps and that was the easy part. The tough part was, from there. On the name Vishwak – there were too many choices suggested, some were geeky, some I needed a dictionary to understand myself, somewhere too alien, somewhere too old, so I decided to go with my sister’s suggestion to name the company after my own name within the family “Vishwak”. Which itself was derived from my mother from VishwakSena – Lord Vishnu’s Commander-In-Chief.

What I enjoy in running Vishwak has been that there has never been a dull moment in the last 10 years. What makes it more interesting is the different countries and culture we get to work with and learn from – currently we are working for clients in India, USA, UK, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Thailand and the list keeps growing. And all this has been possible only because of the dedicated team I have got which today stands at 132 in India and 3 in the USA.